I’ve heard the same thing since 1999 and yet many of us on HN graduated high school or college in the 2000s/2010s and have been employed for decade(s) with successful careers.

If remote work actually resulted in higher productivity, the first attempt to ship the labor base offshore would have worked. (Not that remote is the only variable there, but you brought it up.) With LLMs they see an opening to try again, now that they view labor as commodity babysitters of LLM output.