Not that I seek it out, but whenever I come across a Kent Beck post, I feel exactly the same. Authoritatively Pointing out the obvious with metaphors while having zero practical advice.
I don't understand how this sentiment is weird at all and I think you're reading a lot of your own biases into it. The statement talks about where the work gets done and doesn't speak to how efficiently the work gets done.
There's nothing that prevents remote work from not being efficient enough to further the goals of an organization. It also doesn't prevent one from being a leader and teaching younger folk. In fact, I've had to do this a lot and it's much nicer to get people on a video call and share my screen to teach or do team programming than it is to find a meeting/conference room in the office.
Some people don't like interruptions _precisely_ because it prevents from doing an efficient job. And it's more than slightly annoying when you're getting interrupted multiple times per hour.
Yes, _very_ few things are built solely by an individual, but _nothing_ prevents remote work from "Doing work" as you put it or collaboration between teams.
I worked for ~2 years as a contractor for a government entity in Canada. ~3500 headcount of employees. What I observed there was sickening. This was a place that had white-collar unions for all non-management employees. This union had completely hijacked the mission of this institution. It was no longer about serving the people that this entity was created to serve, but rather to protect the union and its contributors.
The software we were in charge of writing had direct, material impact on the physical and mental well beings of people in the province. Life and death. And at times I saw things like a deployment of features being delayed by weeks/months because a union member who was responsible for _manually_ deploying the changes was on vacation. To automate that deployment meant automating a union employees job and was impossible. These features directly served the needs of people that were in critical need of them.
On the other hand, I have family friends who work for UPS and other delivery services and see the brutal toll it takes on their body and mind. Pushed to absolute limits and exploited because they don't have a union.
But to me, it seems unions can and often do exploit people. After witnessing all of this I've developed a very dim view of humanity. We all just want to exploit someone.