* I'm willing to bet that most of those studies looked at what happens when you take some "on-site" positions and simply hand them to remote team members.*

You'd lose that bet. There are a variety of different methodologies and areas studied.

Companies that embrace remoteness from the start (like GitHub) seem to be doing fine, precisely because they treat remoteness as an asses, not a minor concession someone had to make to workers.

Again - not trying to argue at all that people cannot be fantastically successful as a distributed team.

What I am saying is that every single piece of research I can find says that colocated teams are more effective. This is... interesting... to me.