Amen. For 15 years I've been hoping that the dream of fully distributed teams would come to pass, but I don't think we're there yet for many use cases.

In particular, I think distributed teams work best when a) people already have strong relationships built via plenty of in-person interaction, b) they meet regularly in person, and c) the nature of the work is relatively predictable.

There's definitely some work like that, but early-stage startups benefit a great deal from in person communication, which is high bandwidth, low latency, and very high quality.