For me it's not just about having social needs met, it's also that for a lot of engineering work in-person collaboration is crucial. Serendipitous interactions are important. Passionate discussions involving emotion and empathy are important. Being able to easily grab a co-worker's attention for a minute to show them something on your screen or sketch an idea out on a whiteboard is important. You can technically make some of these things to happen remotely using technology, but in practice, there's just too much friction, and these sorts of interactions don't happen.

I agree that not all roles require this sort of thing. There are employees who can come to the office, work 8 hours, and go home, all without speaking a word to another person. There are probably thousands of employees at Google who could probably be just as effective working remotely. That said, having worked there, I think that's not true for the vast majority of SWE work.