General rule: if you have remote participants, everyone participates in the meeting remote unless there is a good reason otherwise.

Yep we have done this even before lockdowns. If even just one person is remote, we ask everyone to call in rather than going to a meeting room, to force the meeting to be run in an accommodative manner. You need these practices if you collaborate with teams in different offices anyways.

On the other hand this is rough on the people who aren't in the meeting who now have neighbors talking at their desks instead of in meeting rooms

Sounds like a terrible thing.

If it's a terrible thing for all, why is it not a terrible thing for the minority?

The field is levelled.

Is that good? Doesn’t that breed resentment? “Oh, since there is a remote person in the meeting we all have to deal with poor audio, lag, and no eye-contact?”

I should say I was remote for 5 years and the meetings where everyone was remote were much longer, extra overhead, slower responses, and less engagement. They were bad. I’d rather be not an equal participant in a good meeting than fully equal in a bad meeting.

Fair enough.

Though to be clear, the question is whether the benefits of treating the entire team uniformly outweigh the disadvantages of imposing telecoms frictions on all members, rather than just a portion.

Oh that's a good rule, been thinking about it as a solution, so good to know that people do do this.

Remote first has to be the culture for it to work. GitLab is pretty good at this. We have worked hard at our little 20 person consultancy to have a nice remote work culture. It takes effort and sticking to enabling remote first.

Yeah which is why I mentioned existing level of training and adoption.