Very good article. Echoes most things I have been looking for. But I would like to add some things as an offshore dev.
It is darn hard to build a remote team unless you have a thorough understanding of what needs to be done and how it should be done. My opinion is that if you are hiring people remotely you should be operationally skilled to understand their effort, struggle and deadlines. BE EMPATHATIC. If you are running a remote team and you follow the mantra of "hire slow, fire fast" good luck keeping your employees. Make your decisions by getting a second opinion from the employees mentor.
For the feeling of belonging, I would say send your employees merch or an old laptop or something that shows that they are part of the team. I say give people very small bonuses but that is a whole thing. The "thank you"s you say to the other guy on an hourly basis, maybe give a bonus or something on the 10th Thank You, like a small small bonus. Thank yous over chat sound generic. In a super objective straightforward world of remote work money is the convenient way to show appreciation....here I go ranting again.
For pair programming, use VS Code live share with Google Meets. If you and your team is comfortable with it set up a period of time where all of you guys are working together over a group video chat like streamers do. I personally would love seeing my fellow coworker working on something halfway across the world.
If your work environment is super feature-execution driven, having a "fun" slack channel is meaningless. Office noises almost never happen in remote work environment as the employers is paying by the hour. But it is important IMO. But I don't think anyone out there is any employer out there would say, "let's have a weekly virtual meeting where we exclusively don't talk about work, but I will pay you guys anyway; We can drink and talk about stuff".