I mostly agree with you. But I do see what OP is getting at. There's a lot of accidental innovation that occurs during casual bull sessions over coffee breaks.
In a remote environment the tendency is for communication to be more formalized and structured. "Hey, are you available for a call. I just want to go cover X, Y and Z, then I'll let you get back to work." Often time half-baked ideas end up getting polished into important innovations. Without some sort of channel for informal, impromptu discussions a lot of ideas get overlooked.
For me it's the social aspect. I don't mean 'socializing' at work (although that also helps). I just mean avoiding isolation. Being physically distant from my team leads me to start feeling detached from them. But it's different strokes etc. I know myself well enough to know that I pull a lot of motivation from the sense of camaraderie I get by being in an office with people I like, so fully remote work is not for me. In fact, any more than one telecommute day per week is too much for me. Not everyone is like that.
So what I really wish for is increased flexibility.
Remote work eliminates any incidental information transfer. It makes it much harder to have a company culture, which is especially difficult for juniors and new hires to get an understanding of what's important and what's not.
In theory, sure. In practice, I've never had a Slack conversation or video conference which felt as natural, rich, spontaneous or productive as a focused discussion in person. I say that as someone who worked fully from home for five years on a remote dev team.
That's not to say it's not useful. It's better than email, leaves a neat record to come back to and supports asynchronous communication. There are advantages. But strictly speaking, no, you cannot capture everything good and useful about in-person conversation using text and video. I don't think it should be controversial that much of the richness of in-person conversation - tone, nuance, body language, facial expression, spontaneity, speed - can't be meaningfully replicated through remote mediums. You can't get all of these things from a message or video chat. You can get some of them well, and a few others decently, but it isn't the same.
I like remote work a lot and wish more companies would support it. That being said, in my experience when people give honest, cogent criticisms of remote work they mostly receive responses which don't speak to the spirit of their point. In this comment thread, for example, the person you responded to is talking about difficulties. You are responding as if the person was talking about impossibilities. It is (emphatically) not impossible to function as a remote team, and very few people will try to make that case. But in the world we live in and with the technology we currently have, there are things about in-person discussion you will not be able to capture on a remote team.
If nothing else people have different values. Some developers enjoy being highly social when they're working, others don't. Some don't mind interruptions, others do. Many people feel a sense of comfort and empowerment by using Slack or Zoom which makes it easier for them to have productive discussion, for a variety of reasons. Likewise many developers do not get any of the same enjoyment out of a Slack or Zoom conversation that they do from face to face communication.
The vast majority of chats seem to take much more linear time than a 1:1 conversation. Multi-tasking them just means 5 people are tapping you on the shoulder within a near-timeframe. So 5X worse than an office? Slack is often the worst part of some email and forum hybrid.
I often wonder how many problems used to be resolved because people worked together in the same location vs now it feels like the 10 things I interact with in a week are broken or require finding a work-around. Many of the chats are "how do you get around this?"
Video conferencing is great for people taking turns presenting, but my experience is that Zoom with high-end integrated conference rooms on 1Gbps fiber cannot support conversation. The latency and audio processing wreck the normal “traffic control” protocol for interactive discussion. Participants don’t perceive and yield to others trying to jump in, like they would in person. Instead you get a sequence of monologues, which requires formal moderation to work decently.
IRC/Slack/etc is great because you can have informal conversations in a channel where your whole team can observe and participate in a more asynchronous nature.
Human conversations are fine, but you generally don't get a durable record of them after the fact, and only those present will have a chance to participate.
In a remote environment the tendency is for communication to be more formalized and structured. "Hey, are you available for a call. I just want to go cover X, Y and Z, then I'll let you get back to work." Often time half-baked ideas end up getting polished into important innovations. Without some sort of channel for informal, impromptu discussions a lot of ideas get overlooked.