To me, you do your job because that's why you get paid. And for non-managerial roles you work with others not because you want to but because you need to in order to reach assigned objectives.

If you request someone to QA your code as a dev for example, the question of the QA guy knowing you in person, liking you and then knowing he can extort favors later on should never be even a consideration. What I was saying was for some people it is a significant consideration and they can't do any of that remotely. They are people persons and extroverts, their mindset does not allow them to do work without considering the social cost benefit analysis to be done in person. These are the people that demand you turn on cameras during a zoom call.

I mean, it is what it is, not even a problem so long as managers can manage those people as well as everybody else. But it is exactly those people that end up being managers.

It's like trying to explain antarctica to someone in the sahara. You do your job and do it well with no upside other than your paycheck - a lot of people do that and they can be very productive remotely because their objective of getting paid is being met. But when their performance review suffers from their nose not being brown enough they will fall in line and focus on that and inefficiently try to brown nose remotely and then hybrid and still fail and then execs think the reason for lower productivity is WFH not their managerial incompetence for both types of people when they WFH.

There are plenty of succesful remote-first companies. If you suffer from productivity loss it is because your managers and hr are failing at their jobs. Not your employees.