An elegant solution to this has already been proposed: go and share an office with like-minded people from the same or across different companies.
Regardless, having a good brainstorming session in person and actually building a strong sense of community and shared responsibility with a team you're on is so much better in real-life than remote for me.
Another thing is that finding an office space was really hard and we got extremely lucky. Try finding a payable office space in a capital city is not an "easy alternative" for the regular Joe I would say.
But you're ignoring your own responses too, if office space in a CapCit was so expensive and impossible for you, what do you think a business is spending per year on it. You could have an office, or 5 more virtual employees.
Software companies having offices in big cities make as much sense as a manufacturing company having a production building downtown. Maybe it made sense in 1850s but doesn't make sense in the 2020s.
There is no solution for the office crowd except an office based org. It's time for us as an industry to acknowledge that, and to have remote orgs and office orgs separate.