As someone who's been fully remote for going on 5 years and is responsible for managing my own fully remote team at this point: It is a challenge, for sure, but

As someone who's been fully remote for going on 5 years and is responsible for managing my own fully remote team at this point: It is a challenge, for sure, but I think it's incredibly defeatist to call it a failure. Your team not knowing your larger initiatives and how they contribute to them is an organizational failure, not a work from home failure, and is also fully able to happen in an office too. We have biweekly meetings where we arrange our goals and strategies, and share what we've been working on. We call each other constantly when we're struggling with a problem, and I have 1 on 1 meetings with everyone at a frequency of their choosing to talk out potential problems, bitch about engineering challenges, or just shoot the shit for a little bit. This is possible to be done and the fact that it's kind of vaguely easier to do it in an office, IMO, is a shitty trade-off to offer for all the costs, both financial and personal, of RTO.