In many businesses, the single largest limiting factor on productivity is the cost of coordinating with others. It’s possible you have been shielded from this by managers who do that work and give you deliverables you can work towards on your own. But for anyone actually involved in communication heavy work where you have to get everyone on the same page, high bandwidth communication (in person being the highest) is just so much more effective.

Humans aren’t actually that great at working together as the group size scales. It’s a lot like a distributed system that runs over faulty networks, and even worse is not always aware when communication has failed.

Note that all my white-collar jobs with offices had actual offices, with closable doors and sometimes even openable windows. YMMV.

Edit: admittedly, as a student, I had one summer job with a cubicle. but other summer jobs had offices!