> You don't build relationships and trust through jira tickets and emails, you build them through unstructured messy human interactions. They pay off later.

Assuming you're neurotypical.

Which most people are. You make structure how your business works on the typical case. That will provide the most transformation.

> Which most people are.

Definitely not in actual developers or sysadmins.

Most of them are in this manner.

Almost all the ones I've met.

We do an occasional get-together every few months (with a big break due to the plague). Seems to work just as well as when I worked at the office.

I absolutely have close work (and friend) relationships with people on far flung teams, and even companies I no longer work for in countries I'll never visit, whom I've never met in meatspace (or only a couple times at conferences or whatever). These relationships were built mainly by IRC/jabber/slack (depending on the vintage) and phone calls/videocon though, not tickets and email. Time zone probably matters more than anything -- I keep in touch with colleagues from India who I met when working third shift in web hosting support, but couldn't tell you the names of the daywalkers from the same office I was in.

Modern corporate environments are spread out all over the planet. If you can't build relationships without sharing air, you will be at a massive disadvantage. That's just how it is, and it isn't something that was caused by the pandemic, it's a consequence of intense globalization over the past ~40 years and an aggressive investor-driven acquisitions culture.