When I moved from a remote dev job at an insurance company (~5500 employees) to a startup (~20), I was amazed with how much more async the environment was. There are no core hours, everything is a thread unless an urgent need arises, and we're hardly on a zoom call outside standup.

What I've noticed is that I really do have more time to just do work. I end up releasing 3x a week instead of twice a month. I think it's still good to have refinement meetings and set time with the PO/Manager about vision and priority, but this idea that you need to spend even 10% of your time in synchronous discussions with your team is ridiculous.