I've not seen remote meetings or chat clients replicate the kind of talk that goes on casually in person. I've not found them to be smoother at all. Walking around, getting into a different environment, sketching stuff on paper, even the body language and whatnot - it's just not very easy remotely. And while it takes work to make a company go, it takes more work for remote to work, overall.

It's like saying offshoring development is OK because "project management is hard and you have to be on top off things regardless".

But hey, I'm glad it works out for some people. A lot of my work is done remotely. But for core development or engineering on my own project, I'd want to be sure onsite meetings happened with fair regularity.