> Which is why working at the office is important.
I'm so glad you opened up this avenue for follow-up. Even when working at the office, people are not at their desks 100% of the time. People are still human beings and are out of the office for any number of legit reasons that have nothing to do with remote working: dental appointments, work travel, interviewing candidates, vacation, sick leave, etc. Regardless of how you organize your workplace or what mandates you set, people are going to be out all the time. So your knowledge sharing is among the best who are available right now, not necessarily the best sources.
> Somewhat true, but this is completely unavoidable. I know of zero cases where all institutional knowledge is recorded and not siloed in humans. Of course there are degrees.
The key again is the degrees. An organization can choose to bias toward using modern tools or not. "Modern tools" here also broadly includes "writing" because it provides so many advantages over synchronous conversations for knowledge sharing.
> This is why teams exist, why hierarchical organizations exist throughout history, and proper separation of work is crucial.
Here I call your attention to geography. There are any number of reasons for staff to be located where they are, and staff don't typically work on a single project over their careers. This means they will change teams from time to time. Combine these facts and you're going to end up with teams composed of people who live in different places, where it might not make sense to relocate staff (e.g. project only lasts a year).
An example might be: implementation consultants for a software company based in Chicago working onsite at a client in Germany. I suppose you could move the whole software company to Germany, but that only scales to one client. Which also highlights that people are often on multiple teams at the same time.
These concerns are most salient in the most hierarchical organizations, which tend to be the largest and have the largest geographic footprints.