You get wildly different results depending on how the team and leadership adapts to the situation. Neither is guaranteed to succeed and either can work if the team is committed.
For context, I work with hardware in a role most employers think is necessarily in-person.
The team I started the pandemic with adapted to lockdown by spending $500/person on buying equipment and having "just chat" times a couple times a week or before meetings where you could talk naturally. Periodic in-person drinks/dinner/events and an active chat helped too. That worked really well and the infrastructure we built turned out to be useful for all sorts of automation where people wouldn't be physically present anyway. The team is overall in a better position than before.
I also observed a team that didn't do any of that and simply went back to being in-person when lockdown ended. One way that manifested was as excluding remote workers from meetings/information flow. By complete coincidence, that team has trouble hiring and retaining people. When the people they do have take normal vacations or need visa renewals, they're completely unable to work because they never dedicated the time to building infrastructure around employees not being physically present. They're no worse off than they were pre-pandemic, but they effectively wasted 2 years.
I've been working remotely since 2008 and what you describe has been my experience. Working remotely effectively requires leadership to change their ways. It only work if it's "remote first" and if there's no hybrid of having a some people being remote and others in the office.
But making the effort to build a remote team does have a lot of advantages, automation has to be built in which, in the end, helps having greater flexibility when there are issues and people cannot be present. It helps with recruiting talent because you no longer restrict yourself to a single area...
People also say that it's impossible to form friendships with remote coworkers but it's not been my experience, I've made a lot of friends with coworkers who live in different countries and timezones than my own.
For context, I work with hardware in a role most employers think is necessarily in-person.
The team I started the pandemic with adapted to lockdown by spending $500/person on buying equipment and having "just chat" times a couple times a week or before meetings where you could talk naturally. Periodic in-person drinks/dinner/events and an active chat helped too. That worked really well and the infrastructure we built turned out to be useful for all sorts of automation where people wouldn't be physically present anyway. The team is overall in a better position than before.
I also observed a team that didn't do any of that and simply went back to being in-person when lockdown ended. One way that manifested was as excluding remote workers from meetings/information flow. By complete coincidence, that team has trouble hiring and retaining people. When the people they do have take normal vacations or need visa renewals, they're completely unable to work because they never dedicated the time to building infrastructure around employees not being physically present. They're no worse off than they were pre-pandemic, but they effectively wasted 2 years.