Next step?

International companies have been doing this for decades.

Until I retired at the end of 2017 I had worked for over twenty years in a team which had developers and domain experts in the following countries: Norway, UK, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Turkey, USA (several states), Canada, Poland.

A lot don't have closely working together ('two pizza') teams distributed across offices, nevermind timezones more than one or two out.

Occasional collaboration is different from day to day, and I'm sure that's why GP emphasised 'asynchronous' - doing it with your close colleagues requires a shift in how you work, async written communication not chats, PR review not pairing, etc.

This was not occasional collaboration, it was daily video standups, real time collaboration, code review, frequent video discussions with other developers and domain experts, etc.

My team is mostly in office, but we do have people in 2 other time zones. Communication happens mostly in slack (even for people in the office - because it would be too loud otherwise - open plan office, gggrr), but also to include people not in the office. I think having remote people in various time zones is fine, as long as we can "get together" once in a while. We do virtual board game night (well, afternoon for most of us) once a week, and of course, do sprint reviews and planning together.

Well that's been going on for a long time now, most big companies have multiple time zone teams.