The things you're describing don't go away with a remote team. It's not like going remote means all your employees just never talk to eachother in favor of working independently. It just means you use technology to solve in-person problems rather than being in person.
I would argue it's no more miserable, in fact far less, than having to A.) Commute, B.) Sit in a conference room instead of my own home, C.) Let people walk over to my desk whenever they want and interrupt me.
I think about (and struggle to value) point C often. The disruption can be very annoying but the knowledge transfer often has a huge multiplier attached to it. One person's small piece of knowledge can give an entire team major traction. This model also promotes tribal knowledge and weak documentation...which is acceptable for a small company, not so much for larger companies where people are spread out across geographies.
I wonder, is this a proxy for remote teams? Will large companies have an outsized advantage in this space? Or does the lower overhead favor small companies?
I think that it's just a fundamentally different way of thinking. Having a distributed team means you have to remove the "I'll just walk over and ask" mentality from everyone involved. You must resist the temptation to use slack as an alternative to in-person communication. Communication must be frequent, documented and public - someone else needs to be able to see the decisions you made.
But your description of (C) reflects a presumption of what I would call working independently. In many work cultures, and on many kinds of projects, that freedom is important and mostly unavailable in a culture where people have to stop to put on pants and hop on a call.
> Let people walk over to my desk whenever they want and interrupt me.
If you are the kind of person to think that way and spend most of your time working at your desk, your work is probably relatively independent.
I am thinking about communications people who normally spend most of the day in a boardroom or developers who also have a hand in requirement analysis.
Can you describe why you couldn't spend a day in a boardroom _virtually_? Or how developers involved in "requirement analysis" need to be in the same room?
It isn't impossible, just more difficult, mostly based on human factors.
Say you have developers who don't like confrontation. During an in-person requirement analysis, you might see their irritation in the in-person meeting and extract their opinion. Hidden behind screens, anything no matter how absurd, might get approved. They might also clarify requirements less. This is happening on my team, as we developers challenge far less and are used to being asked their opinion.
On the comms team, the mostly use Teams and a lot of their work is detail oriented. Problem is, chat systems aren't great about making sure you see everything so a lot more time is spent correcting errors in understanding.
I think that blaming remote work to mask people/team problems that existed in person is unwise. If your team isn't comfortable being legitimate and honest during requirement analysis, is it worth having? If, in person, the process breaks down into "What the team lead can notice about the team's body language/behavior during requirement analysis", I would probably suggest that there needs to be a fundamental rethinking of the purpose of that meeting. And this is why, I think, the problems being blamed on remote work are usually much larger/harder problems that can get swept under the in person rug.
I don't see it as a fundamental problem with remote work, but remote work requires that many things work a lot better than they on average do. You can try and fix everything from team dynamics and documentation or drag everyone into the office and have the problems kind of be fixed by default.
You run into this issue with documentation too. A lot of the "go chat with X" really should be "go read Y on the wiki." But fixing that, especially after long periods of neglect, is a project likely to fail.
I would argue it's no more miserable, in fact far less, than having to A.) Commute, B.) Sit in a conference room instead of my own home, C.) Let people walk over to my desk whenever they want and interrupt me.