In my experience, almost anyone who insists on synchronous, in-person standups is doing so because they want them to function this way, whether consciously or unconsciously.
I also suspect that standups with no active brevity constraint frequently come about not because of a lack of leadership but because they're actually a means for disordered thinkers to feel productive, which I think goes part of the way towards explaining why you see such irrational attachment to standups even among ICs.
But, yeah, IC = prole.
In large agile projects I've worked in before, we've split into teams of 5-10 and had separate stand ups, with leads from each team having a weekly "scrum of scrums" separately.