My career was a similar length, but I'm retired now. ~2/3 of my career was remote. My personality made remote (or a private office, which was rare) significantly more productive. When others can observe me at my desk, I'm highly self-conscious and that distracts me. Catching glimpses of others' faces while I'm looking around in thought also rips me out of the flow. But when I know I'm alone, focus is a lot easier for me. Home is even better than a private office because when I'm not feeling it, I can go start a load of laundry or take out the trash, then come back and see if I'm feeling it. When I am feeling it, I can go longer because some of the chores are now out of the way. That was all as an engineer.

For the last ~1/3 of my career I was a manager, and most of that time was in the office. Being remote as a manager was a lot harder for me. I found it so much easier to understand where someone's head was at when we could sit in a room or take a walk together. If I saw them fidgeting more than usual in a one-on-one, I could try to figure out if there was something they were having trouble bringing up, or if they just weren't feeling like spending time together that day. If I saw a different look on their face than usual when they were at their desks, I could use that as a trigger to check-in and see if there was anything I could help with. It was a lot harder when those little clues were missing, especially during a difficult time like the pandemic. I eventually learned to replace some of that with DMs ("Hi there, it's been a few days since we've chatted, so I wanted to check-in to see how you're doing. Anything I can do for you?"), but it was more like me polling than me getting notifications, so it felt more intrusive and less efficient.

That's all just me. I think the differences vary a lot by person, by role, and even by team/company. There were certainly periods where being able to grab lunch and/or a whiteboard was extremely valuable (and fun!).

Similarly my career started off 'full remote' as it was a small company that began in the late 90's almost by accident, picking up employees mostly from meeting them on industry-specific IRC channels. The initial 5 or 6 employees including myself never met each other until a number of years later when we could afford flights/hotels to have a company sponsored event.

After that team grew beyond a small handful of individuals who all knew each other and were used to working remotely (e.g. open source style of work) it got a lot harder.

The absolute best working situation for me was having an office everyone typically worked out of, but I was not required to work from. I found that I could balance my workload where I'd be in the office 2-3 days a week doing the "social" stuff like collaborating with my team on whiteboard level designs, meeting with other teams, catching up on e-mail, etc. Then I'd have 2-3 days of focus time at home to go head down and ignore the outside world to get more technical deep dive work done.

This only really worked for me though because everyone else worked from the office. I would wake up one morning, and simply decide to go in or not based on how I was feeling. If other folks were remote or hybrid it simply would have not been nearly as valuable.

I very much miss the office. I actually moved states and into the big city to be closer to it about 6 months before COVID hit. All the expense of bigy city living, none of the benefit! I am now fully remote like I was at the start of my career.