> They are more likely to attend meetings ... give status updates, etc.
Weird. If I missed meetings and failed to give status updates (especially ones where my update was explicitly requested) my manager would go find out what the fuck was wrong with me.
> If you are blocked or are blocking someone, it's a tap on the shoulder instead of sending a message into the ether.
After more than four years of most software folks doing remote work, if your team hasn't established a solid protocol for doing IMs, voice/video chats, and email communications then your management has been fucking off and management deserves all the remote-communications failures they're getting. So, for the rest of this discussion let's assume that management hasn't been fucking off and you actually have a solid communications protocol.
If a coworker is regularly blowing off messages, then that's something that their manager NEEDS to know about. (And it's likely that if they're blowing off messages, they'd also be fucking off if their ass was in a company-provided seat.) However, if a coworker is failing to reply because they're working on something else that's more important then this is another thing that their manager needs to know about and consider reprioritizing your, their, or both people's tasks.
Frankly, I find the "get someone's attention with an IM (whether direct or in a team chat channel) or email" mechanism to be far, far, far better than having someone shatter my chain of thought by coming over to physically interrupt me. I know when I can't handle interruptions, so I can configure my software to not interrupt me. Others can't possibly know when I can't handle interruptions, so they can't help BUT to interrupt me during those periods.