Remote requires personal responsibility as well. From everybody
Remote first is a spectrum and dismissing lived experiences as “oh, you just haven’t experienced the right kind of remote first” helps no one.
What makes you think documenting everything exhaustively is a panacea? What if the quality of documentation sucks? Will your argument change to “you have to document everything to a certain level of quality otherwise you aren’t remote first enough”?
Please don’t feel I’m attacking you. I was a big remote first proponent before experiencing the difficulties of integrating with teams who didn’t know me except as a voice on a call.
After this, I’m more sympathetic to execs demanding RTO for culture reasons.
Companies that have gone fully remote, also quickly discover how much of their company knowledge is in one person's head, or whether it's well documented, which helps with the onboarding too.
Some companies have definitely moved to remote working better than others.
We parted ways about 9 months into the job when we both realised this wasn’t working.
My impression is that remote work for new employees needs a lot of explicit relationship and trust building that we get for free when we interact with people in an office.