The difficulty of remote collaboration is fundamentally a bandwidth problem. People are cramming into the bay area not because they love the congestion and high prices, but because the bandwidth between brains in close proximity is quite high. When you scatter them across the nation, the bandwidth is limited by ISPs who own the last-mile network. Once video conferencing becomes frictionless, maybe remote collab will pick up momentum, but the US has some political obstacles to overcome before that can happen.