> if you are literally sitting in the same room as your collaborators
Your very premise is wrong. At any sufficiently large company, you are unlikely to be sitting in the same room as every collaborator and stakeholder, or even proxies for them.
As a simple example, the team I currently work on (on one project of several) is 10 people across 8 US cities in all four US mainland timezones, and the stakeholders and collaborators are across Australia, Asia, Europe and the Americas. A good majority of what I do is pair programmed, yet the pull request workflow is essential to letting _others_ know what is happening and why, and to allow them to have asynchronous input into the process.
You might argue it would be better for the team to be in a room somewhere. Maybe so, but the people this project demands live where they live and could not even agree a common location for that room to be if they wanted to. And it still wouldn’t help the other projects…