I'm not sure whether it would work better today.
What seems odd about the glasses is that they're essentially bodycams, but just unobtrusive enough not to be identified as such from a distance.
Someone walking around with an AR headset makes it very clear they're wearing a tech device, someone holding up a phone in front of them signals "I might be filming", but someone wearing slightly unusual glasses won't catch any attention. And that seems very weird to a lot of people.
Not really. The office market is not that huge and the vacancies overall are also not that bad. It's not like every single office is suddenly empty.
On the flip side: where these offices are located, housing is extremely expensive, so you could transform some offices to apartments, pivot projects currently in construction and maybe even demolish some older buildings.
These headlines are just a sign that the current management class is utterly incapable of reacting to anything but "line go up". They can't understand that they can't exploit their way out of this for once.