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I was practicing TOEFL speaking test and one of the practice tasks was:
Do you agree or disagree with the following statement?
Co-workers make the best friends.
My questions:
"Coworkers make the best friends" is saying that the state of being coworkers is the best way to befriend people. In general, "making friends" is an idiom for the process of befriending someone.
That's different to saying that you are friends with someone, since that denotes the befriending process as having completed.
Also, I'd disagree with the truth of that statement, since coworkers are often not friendly at all, and your relationship with them is often purely transactional at best. Just see the many questions on the Workplace SE site about conflicts between work colleagues to see proof of that!
I'm not sure why an English language test is asking you about office politics, however.
It means when Co-workers become friends, they are "the best" friends. So, yes, it is close in meaning to saying they are the best friends.
Although if interpreted literally the sentence could mean that Co-workers are somehow very skilled at making friends, that is very likely not the intended interpretation.
Sentences constructed like "[Noun A] make [Adjective] [Noun B]" are usually either literally describing one thing creating another (Babies make happy noises) or they are talking about how the first noun does if it tries to fill the role of the second noun. The correct interpretation depends on the context.
Sentences like this where it refers to one thing becoming another might actually be using "make for" but omitting the word "for". I'm not 100% sure that's true, but it sounds right. (I'm a native speaker, and I'm not perfect at knowing how to state all the grammatical rules.)
