This is a huge straw man. Non-verbal communication is limited to shallow observations? Sentiment analysis and cross validation?

I don’t think engineers, particularly programmers, have the communication skills to pull of remote work. Only ones who I’ve seen do it well are those who had a liberal arts background. As in they are already good writers. Our profession as a whole has such bad writers and communicators and that’s why remote work is so controversial

It’s definitely gonna become the norm, so I think it’s worth investing time into becoming a better writer, even to the point of gasp a liberal arts minor