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.