It's no surprise that the vast majority of distributed teams are significantly less effective and/or productive than in office teams. It's much easier for people to hide when most people are WFH.
What you say is only the case if people
want to hide. If they actually want to get a job done and are 'engaged' with the business then they can be more productive WFH.
I appreciate that it's harder for some businesses to get people engaged, though, because the bigger they are, the more processes they have to have and the more reasons there are for people not to be engaged. Shouldn't be impossible though.
It really boils down to does the business trust its staff.
The last company I worked at
sort of allowed working from home, but begrudged it: if you asked 'can I work from home tomorrow', the response would be 'well, I'd rather you didn't'... but if you just took the liberty anyway, they wouldn't complain, as long as you showed having done some work.
They didn't really trust the staff, and they definitely saw it as a "treat", as in, they used offering it as a carrot to dangle, or withdrawing it as a stick to beat with, as appropriate. I think from this perspective the business needs a very fair policy as well, i.e., either everybody's allowed to work from home whenever they want, or no-one is. If some are allowed and some aren't, then there's bound to be resentment.
They were the sort of company that has to employ managers to make sure people are doing their job, because they don't provide them with sufficient reason to want to do it of their own accord. Like I say - this is harder the bigger the business imho, but by no means impossible.
In contrast my current company is fully bought into working from home, it trusts its staff, and essentially relies on us being engaged, but is small enough to know that they are. It measures productivity by what we deliver and communicate, rather than how many hours they can physically see us in front of a computer... (I specifically went for it for that reason).
Personally, I resent presenteeism and am (was) willing to go to a lot of effort to avoid having to spend upwards of an hour or two hours travelling back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, forth and back.... same old route, same old traffic, day after day.
(In terms of laptops the one work got me turned out to be exactly the same model as my existing home one, just slightly higher spec... so conveniently fits into the existing docking station
)