Having worked in both environments before, one thing that I observed is that working remotely can indeed be highly productive, but it's very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to do it successfully if only a few employees are working remotely.

Otherwise what happens is that the people who can see each other face to face and in the hallway will of course do it, leaving the odd remote person out of many conversations. So either the remote person won't be as in the loop as the others (bad for them, and bad for the overall team dynamic because someone needs to be treated specially), or else everyone on the team needs change their otherwise perfectly normal and perfectly productive patterns of communication (leading to frustration with the artificial constraint).

So there's nothing inherently wrong with remote workers, but it's probably better to go "all in" like some companies are starting to do, or try to avoid it at all, except in very special circumstances.

I bet many of the "99%" of companies the author was referring to that said "no" to his working remotely simply fell into the category where the majority of existing employees weren't remote, so they they chose not to introduce the new and arguably difficult to manage dynamic.