I’m intrigued that the strongest arguments you have for returning to face-to-face meetings are entirely solvable by video chat. I’ve been working fully remotely with colleagues in a different country since before covid struck, and we’ve successfully engineered a culture of communication that’s even more comfortable than my previous in-office employments. We ping each other whenever we need to chat, talk as long (or as briefly) as we need, and we make a point of meeting regularly to check in both professionally and personally, or to virtually chat together over lunch / coffee in small groups, so that our interactions aren’t all serious and professional.

This isn’t my first remote engagement, and I’ve had a few where they didn’t get communication right, but that’s not an insufficiency of the medium — I can say unequivocally that it’s definitely a cultural thing.