I have been remote for 3+ years. Our team is fully remote. Although in theory, we could go into any of the local offices no one on the tech staff does that.

Admittedly, it’s not FAANG, but rather one of the Big 3 so you may not think our projects are quite as complex. We do however write software that is the core support for multi billion dollar companies.

I used to think that tech companies would jump on remote work first, but now I doubt it. Tech companies put an emphasis on things like political ethics, mission, and putting the company first. All of the above are hard to foster without a face to face community.

Although freelance I work with the same company, mostly, and their core dev team is entirely remote. Their company deals with pretty complex projects. Maybe not Google level complex but in spite of how much it gets talked about here, that's not all that matters. The majority of companies and projects will do just fine if they go fully remote.

> but remote is difficult for complex projects

A bit difficult, yes, but far from uncommon. Witness Linux, Scylla, RedHat, GitLab, Firefox, WordPress...