Productivity depends on the phase of work. Simplisticly put there are two phases of mental work such as programming: i/o bound and brain bound.
If you're in the i/o bound phase remoting is often hard. You need to talk to people, pull answers from them, communicate, coordinate, reach agreements and nail down development plans. You can't do anything anyway unless you agree on the next steps first.
Conversely if you're brain bound all you want is a laptop and being alone at home because it's way more efficient to focus on a problem when you can forget about everything else. You can't plan ahead anyway unless you dig down in the code and see for yourself first what will work and what needs to change.
These phases alternate in worklife, maybe based on projects, time of the month, the whatever happenstances take place in the progress of development. Usually when you're stuck in one phase you really need to spend time in the other phase for a while. This is normal.
This has consequences. People working remotely tend to maximise their time on what they're efficient at, i.e. brain bound programming. At the office it's easier to invite people to meetings through the week to get work done that way because you can't really be brain bound at the office anyway. Thus remote types and office types tend to inflate their favourite phase as much as possible.
This inflation happens because these two phases are inherently incompatible with each other, and crossing the gap to switch phases is tedious.
But if you only ever work i/o bound you begin to wonder how could people work remotely at all. After all, everything happens in the office anyway so maybe working from home could work if only we add enough meetings to keep the remote people more tightly in the loop... And people working steadily from home begin to fathom, in time, whether it's possible at all to work at the office as all you have is constant breaks, meetings, people coming to ask about stuff and you can't ultimately get any real work done.
Different things begin to become important for people who don't alternate. So there's a slight confirmation bias in how people flock to the position and environment that maximises the kind of work they're really good at. But the caveat is that in doing this that you could be comfort-siloing yourself. So natural and healthy alternating between phases is what keeps you open and able to adjust to changes in work life and work projects.
On the other hand, people who alternate too often begin to get nothing done. You need to allocate batches of time for both phases in some moderate proportion. How to balance that is more of an art than anything else.
Sounds familiar, anyone? This is a dynamic I've observed in my own work life over and over again.