This was an area that improved hugely at my workplace, because we're spread across multiple buildings in multiple cities anyway; the pre-COVID dynamic was that

This was an area that improved hugely at my workplace, because we're spread across multiple buildings in multiple cities anyway; the pre-COVID dynamic was that people were in the habit of including only those in physical proximity. COVID has made cross-city collab instinctive for people. The comment you're responding to sounds like a team resenting the inability to have the (bad) habit of only talking to people in physical proximity.