Sorry if I wasn't clear - these lunches have nothing to do with work. I eat lunch sometimes, my colleagues eat lunch sometimes. Sometimes we go out to eat together and socialize. Work doesn't enter into the equation. We lose that benefit when going fully remote.
There is value to me in having lunch with my current colleagues. I also get value out of having lunch with my ex-colleagues who are now just my friends in the same city. We still have lunches together. I am thankful that I used to work in the same city as my colleagues so that this is still possible!
My manager worked entirely remote for our company since it's inception, literally in a separate time zone. I never met him, I don't even know what his face looks like. I still had better interaction, cooperation, and discussion with him than most of my other coworkers, excepting only someone who was already my friend before this job. When we wanted to discuss something, we brought it up in our teams chat, and they could go one for significant time or topics, sharing opinions, plans, work related thoughts and designs, and often personal improvement things including programming ethics and work adjacent learning presentations.
Don't force me to comply to your interaction style just because you don't understand mine.
Of course not. They're an ersatz replacement for the in-person thing. They do the job about 90% as well. Is that a problem? In the corporate world, most things are ersatz, if you're not an executive. Mediocre supplies, mediocre management, mediocre training, mediocre pay... why should we force people to shlep just to pretend their jobs aren't mediocre? A standard-issue corporate job can be done from anywhere.
> There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues?
Again, of course not; but if a company is going to expect or require people to do it, it should foot the bill for the inconveniences caused.