Standups are (in my experience) usually a symptom of a low-trust environment, where there's an underlying belief that engineers will do less work or let things slip without the fear of being behind at the next standup. In some companies, this is actually true - so in some cases, standups are certainly effective - but I can't think of any argument for why they'd be necessary at all companies.
Our team is distributed and has been going ~eight months without standups or work hours, and I'm extremely happy with the quality and pace of our engineering. This requires a high-trust environment where every person is given large feature areas that they are able (and incentivized) to drive autonomously, but I think this ends up being better both for productivity and for quality-of-life.