> Have you worked in startups though? Organizations of 1-20 people where the whole company doesn't know who its customers are, why they would buy the product, or how to make money?

That sounds like an amazingly poorly run startup with horrible leadership.

The startups that I've seen that are successful purposefully try to fix that problem. We flew people out to customers, had them shadow them to see how they worked, and had a group of customer advisors. Out of all the startups I've been involved with the remote ones have done the best.

Honestly, the manager you're describing is incompetent. Why is that manager relying on reading body language instead of building enough trust with their engineers where the engineers would just say "that's impossible?". It seems like that manager is doing a poor job and is using remote work as an excuse for their own lack of ability.