At work you'll have your team of engineers, with managers who aren't actually working on the engineering problems themselves. Heck, they might not even be engineers. They are dealing with representing the engineering team as a whole in interactions with other engineering teams, or with non-engineering teams and higher level managers.
In every MMORPG I've played, the "managers" were players out there on the front lines with the rest of the group. You didn't have someone whose role was to just direct and coordinate what the rest of the guild did, and represent the guild to outside interests. No, your "manager" was right out swinging a weapon or casting spells with the rest of the guild on a raid.
Maybe that's the difference? In a game, your "manager" on a team is just another one of the team who does all the normal things expected for the class of character they are playing and just happens to also be coordinating things. At work, manager is a distinct role very different from the roles of the people they are managing. Perhaps that changes the nature of team sufficiently to make trust harder to build?
You trust, you lose.
I've been wondering how much boils down to introverted and extroverted types. Not long after the office lockdowns started, my work calendar became flooded with optional events sent to every employee. I can only view these as coping events, they serve no direct business need.
Also, what is "real" and what is "imaginary"? Time is real regardless of if I spend it on something "real" like work or something "imaginary" like a game.
If I put in 30 hours helping my team on something that I don't actually find fun or interesting because I expect my team will later put in the time to help me with something I do find fun or interesting and my team lets me down I'm just as annoyed at the lost 30 hours if it is a game team as I am if it is a work team. Heck, at least with the work team I still get paid for those useless hours.
This stuff has real world as well as emotional value. Just because it's a video game doesn't mean it's less important to those participating in it.
I've never met the majority of my coworkers in person and we're no less productive than when I work with other coworkers in person. The CEO is entirely remote too.
The survival instinct is also a stake that living things create for themselves.
If you blow up at someone during a sports game, there will be real-world consequences for you, eventually you will not be able to play that game at all in your geographic area.
If you yell at people over a computer headset it doesn't matter what they think of you, you can simply move on to the next group of people. Very rarely (mostly at the very top levels) does reputation matter. And at the end of the day you can simply name change and escape your rep.
Interpersonally the stakes are orders of magnitude lower in video games than in RL.
Sources of many counterexamples: EverQuest, World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Rift.
In all of these games numerous groups of people who have never interacted with each other in person have formed long term successful trusting teams.
EverQuest in particular in its first several years required a lot of teamwork to reach the highest level content, with each team member having to put in effort equivalent to a full time job. EverQuest had a huge "death penalty" compared to pretty much every MMORPG since, with a death sometimes wiping out days or even weeks of advancement and preparation. It was designed so that you could do very little solo or even in small groups at the high end so you had to rely upon and trust your teammates.
Later MMORPGs toned it down a bit compared to EverQuest [1], but they still all had things that greatly benefited from successful trusting teams, and those teams formed in all of them.
[1] As did EverQuest itself. In fact, EQ today is actually a quite fun and interesting game to play solo. On a free play account you can reasonably get a character up to around level 50 solo, which was the limit in original EQ, and that solo character will be able to do a large fraction of what had been the high end content back in the day. On a paid account, which opens up access to more abilities, you can easily solo into at least the 80s or maybe 90s (115 is the current max level).