Interesting. I work from home most often, and I find that not having to tack on a 2 1/2 hr daily car commute leaves me time for actually socializing IRL as opposed to trying to cram that need into the office.
If you only socialize with co-workers I'd say that is the bigger problem. All my interaction with people outside office hours are with people I don't work with.
Should I consider myself privileged in this respect?
I have a collection of friends from different contexts. Some from past jobs, the gym and other friends. So WFH is great. If your only social group is work, then you should expand your circle, because you never know when the employer might fire you or lay you off. Which will make you very sad because suddenly you lose all your friends.
I've only had one job in my whole career where I met people I wanted to hang out with outside work. One of two of the guys I work with now might meet that bar if they weren't so far away.
Where else do we find people? Well, we're all older, so we already had friends from other activities -- political involvement, volunteering for arts orgs, our cycling group, etc.
I think your schedule (“work from home most often”) is my ideal. Did you find it difficult to find a company that permits this? Did you have to negotiate for it, or is it pretty standard for everyone?
To be fair I grew into it. Company moved several times as we grew, each time moving further away from where I lived. I had to work from home for a while when I broke my leg. It just sorta stuck from there. I mainly work with International teams, so F2F are mostly just a quarterly meeting affair. I'm well aware not being 'in the office' each day hurts my internal visibility, but it's a trade-off. Not going to waste <50% of my non-work, non-sleep, non-chore time sitting behind the wheel of a car in a traffic jam.
When on linkedin, set it to looking for a job / open looking for new work to notify recruiters and add a message to the box saying you're looking for remote only. They will come in droves.