This is a legitimate thing to want, and I myself prefer remote work and run a distributed company...
...but I don't think it's engaging with the problems involved.
Management exists for a reason. I'm not going to speculate too hard on what that reason is, but it's a profession older than those practiced by just about anyone on this forum, found across every culture, in every part of the world, at every time in history. You could say that it's just the case that managers can abuse and extract value from their employees, and that certainly does occur, but in claiming that that's all that management is you would be arguing for the greatest market failure in the history of mankind. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, but you better have some really strong evidence if you want to argue it's remained irrational independently and in the same way across millennia.
So taking for a moment for granted that management exists and is important, its ease of execution does matter, too. And I think it's more-or-less a truism that it's a lot easier to manage a group of people who are all in a room, who you see every day, whose facial expressions and mannerisms you have a chance to read, whose casual water-cooler (water-bag? why do you have a bag of water? i am so curious) conversations you can overhear or participate in.
Remote work has trade-offs, and like any trade-off, it's in principle legitimate for someone to decide the upsides outweigh the downsides. They might be wrong about the trade-offs they choose to make, but that's not the same thing as being a petty tyrant - it's just running into the limitations of your judgment, which is a very ordinary human thing to do. If you want to convince people to run remote teams, you need to figure out what the trade-offs they're concerned about are and address them, not pretend they aren't there at all.