I've absolutely heard stories of people feeling terrible going back to work. They could do all of their work from home, no commute. But now suddenly they are expected to go back to the office, commute, maybe suddenly pay for childcare when they could get away with not doing so, and they have to be at the office more hours for the same amount of work than they spent doing it at home, because they are forced to either be there for 40+ hours and/or in-person meetings and such wasting their time.
When I worked still I didn't have 40 hours' worth of work. I tried repeatedly to address this with management, but whenever I did they made up busy work for me. It was not legitimate work that needed to be done for the office, but now suddenly I was expected to do it just because I complained. It made me stop talking to management about it and I would just pretend to be busy whenever I got my actual legitimate work done for the day or week. It was INCREDIBLY frustrating and soul draining. That contributed a lot to me wanting to FIRE. Why should I waste 40 hours a week plus 5-6 hours a week combined commuting time of my life for something that takes me only a smaller percentage of those hours to do? I feel like working at home has exposed more people to the realities of similar situations and it is also frustrating them.
When I had a job similar to the one you describe, I handled it by bringing my own laptop into work every day, with my own hotspot internet connection (away from the spying eyes of the employer's computer network), and I would just do whatever I wanted online. Mostly researching investments, learning new skills, etc. I internally justified it to myself as, I was learning new skills that might be useful in my career some day.
It really depends on how closely you are monitored at work by your peers and supervisor(s), so the degree to which you can get-away with this might vary. In my situation, most of my co-workers didn't know it was my personal laptop -- they thought it was a company laptop and that I was actually doing work. My direct boss rarely ever came by where I sat. It was pretty nice, although I sometimes had thoughts about being "found out". In the end, it didn't matter, because I fulfilled the requirements of the job, apparently, since they never laid me off.
I ended up leaving that job, for a different one -- that pays a bit better, but has very different expectations about how much stuff I need to do to fulfill the requirements of my job. I now work a legitimately full schedule, and then some.
Both extremes have their plusses and minuses. I'm already at FIRE-level-assets, so I can walk away whenever I want, if things become intolerable.