Taiwan's on a soft lockdown right now, and through g0v we've had a couple online hackathons via gather.town that went swell in my opinion, with lots of discussions and cool ideas popping around. And, a vibrant and highly active community across a huge volume of projects is maintained on the g0v slack. Off the top of my head, through online conversation only, the idea of scraping all Taiwanese hospital websites for vaccination registration information, through implementation of said app, was completed successfully. We also have the advantage of instantaneous response at nearly full capacity. That is to say, we don't need to wait until we can all get together physically to begin brainstorming and solution implementation around a given issue, such as when our COVID breakout happened and a lot of solutions arose quickly, such as translations of information, easy ways for businesses to register and print out QR code posters for our contact tracing system, and the sharing of COVID data.
I wonder if that's because there's no physical interaction whatsoever. I admit that when teams are mixed physical/non-physical, there can be information shared between physical people that the non-physical miss out on, but as others are saying, while that might seem faster, I'm not sure the added sloppiness is necessarily an advantage. In any case it seems like a very difficult thing to measure, especially when right now companies are trying to measure their productivity changes due to shifts to remote during an immensely psychologically traumatic time for everyone on earth.
Elsewhere I'm seeing further naturalist fallacy arguments, like we've "evolved" this way. I think that's a good counter to the "rugged individualistic" types that think humans would be better off living alone in the woods with a crate of beer and a shotgun or whatever, but in the far more complex social web of civilization, where you can still have social interaction but modulated to your needs, I don't think we can say "in person is better because we didn't have computers for the first 200,000 years of humanity. I'm sure one can see what else I can apply here: we also didn't have, I dunno, vaccines? Actually, better yet: we didn't have spoken language for a very, very long time, and we interacted "just fine" without it insomuch as our entire ancestral history for a couple hundred million years survived to the point where homo sapiens could finally branch off and eventually figure out complex language. Same goes for writing. So, that's kind of the problem with naturalist arguments.