This. If you're all doing the same thing, but separately (telemarketing boiler-room, phone customer support, data entry, etc) you can do that at home and sometimes at your own pace and schedule.

But for any organizations tackling more complicated problems such that coordination and teamwork is vital (the kinds of things they pay people more than $80K to do), the machine can't function if some cogs are spinning at their own pace, or on their own schedule. Also while team cohesiveness in an ESTABLISHED team can be maintained by remote means for some period of time (my wife's doing it now, and I did it for years in mil reserves), you cannot FORM a team or maintain it indefinitely without inter-personal connections.

Tech can also allow teams to respond more rapidly, especially to crisis, since you can reach out and touch folks after hours and on weekends/holidays. But we were already doing this, the "leash" was a thing before I quit my real job to fly decades ago.

I think a fair amount of the work which was suited to remote work was already being done remotely, and some of that was part-time/informal due to the natural invasiveness of tech into our lives.

Organizations which think they're going to go 100% virtual might get their lunch eaten by their competitors, although I'm sure there are niche applications where you could pull it off, perhaps even more efficiently, if and only if you have the right people. In an office environment, the bosses can impose teamwork and coordination on those who don't naturally gravitate to that, but for permanent remote work you need the right kind of work, the right kind of people, or both. Software engineering comes to mind.