I agree with you I think the answer is probably somewhere in between.
I think we are agreed that upgrading infrastructure to fibre is a good thing, and I think that all industrial / business parks / critical infrastructure should be done. No argument here.
But I'm pretty certain a lot of the cost is that last mile to homes and I really just can't understand why it's so important!
If I am a techie supporting a business from home - the businesses DONT WANT data funnelled back to a house, processed there and sent back. What normally happens is either remote control (small bandwidth) or VPN with processing happening on the server (again small bandwidth).
Home businesses - once they get to a certain size - have other problems that mean their server(s) should be moved to where there probably will be fibre anyway - security, fire, redundancy, availability, access, etc.