I think the point of the article is to show that the CEOs empty words are empty
Maybe. To me it read more like: “According to Zoom’s CEO, Zoom can’t fully replace in-person interaction for work. Therefore, it’s bad/useless software - or the CEO is bullshitting.” Which is just bad reasoning. The conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises. Maybe I’m just taking it too literally, but I just don’t like when articles use such bad reasoning, even if I agree with their conclusion.
fail to account for spaces critical to trust-building such as water-cooler talk and outside of work events
What do you mean by that? If you are fully virtual there’s going to be no water cooler talk - but that’s a legitimate difference between in-person and virtual that should affect the results of the study. So it makes sense to me that the study shouldn’t try to control for that.
and fail to replicate virtual versions of predominantly in-person activities
I don’t think you can. Take for example board games as an in-person activity. The virtual replacement would be video games. A video game can do everything a board game can (with some exceptions) - but it can do so much more. So, purely from a game design perspective, video games would be much better. The main thing that video games don’t have, while board games do, is the in-person interaction. Yet, there’s plenty of people who play board games, but not video games. Clearly the in-person part is important.