Even if the engineers themselves are cooperative, their managers / business owners will resist close cooperation and enforce work at arm's length (e.g. 1x weekly calls).
Ask me how I know. I once spent £300k (fortunately not my money) on an outsourced team of developers, and they delivered nothing at the end. Most of the time it was simply about aligning the work! We (me and my partner, we together had some idea of what we actually wanted) tried repeatedly to make sync-s more frequent, to better align the efforts, but their managers kept resisting. It's the "consulting" business model!
For remote jobs, the incentives are reversed. You're literally a full-time employee, there's no management layers to impede communication, and (unless you're lazy or a fraud) you probably want to work on interesting problems and not be bored!