It’s been known for a long, long time that developers minimally need near total silence to do their jobs properly

According to whom? I've been a developer near 14 years now and have worked in siloed offices, cubicles, open office spaces, and my last job was 100% remote for two years. From what authority do you claim to draw the assertion that this is the case?

Anecdote is no replacement for quantitative sample sizes, but this statement seems too absolute to hold any validity without qualifying by whose standards you are suggesting that it has been known for a-as you put it-"long, long time".

What you glibly call “a senior developer helping a junior developer” is not that.

Glib? I'm sorry friend, but no. Absolutely not. Taking two minutes to help someone new on the job find answers periodically throughout the day, and wheeling my chair 180 degrees to render aid as the senior developer is not glib.

What's "glib" is this idea that I am somehow disrupting the workforce, and destroying productivity by preferring to talk to the person who literally sits three feet away from them to help solve a problem than smacking away at my keyboard to answer a question that takes the better part of 180 seconds were I to verbalize "Here's the solution you're looking for and how it fits in to the larger scheme of this feature we're working on". I've been on the other end of that, it felt cold and impersonal as a newbie, and I strive to be the kind of team leader I wanted when I was that junior developer.

The culture of “just quickly answer my question right now” is horrible, productivity-killing nonsense, but here you’re acting like it’s the only possible way to work.

Answering a question quickly is productivity-killing? Then how are you defining productivity, friend? If it's a question that has a short, sufficient and ultimately resolute answer that gets my junior developers the support and response they need to solve the challenges we face as a team, elongating that answer out to a long essay-diatribe is more killing to the productivity. If by that point we need more time, then-as I said in another comment-it absolutely is valid and worthwhile to say "Let's schedule some time to get into a conference room and whiteboard through the problem". Go look above this comment chain, I said as much pretty clearly.

And speaking of clearly? I really appreciate that you took this position and completely ignored the fact that I went through great effort to indicate that I prefer to speak directly to someone "within reason" and went as far as to suggest that when the person is sitting mere inches away from me, that is a scenario that I personally consider "within reason". That alone should have been a pretty clear indicator to you that no, I actually do NOT think that it's the only possible way to work, just a very effective one given the proximity to my cohort. I had hoped that the context clues would reveal themselves clearly, evidently and plainly. I see now that they did not.

I'm going to go ahead and take this time to leave the thread entirely, this debate stopped being fruitful a long time ago and I'm frustrated with myself that I spent as much time replying to it as I have.

Please do, if nothing else, have a wonderful weekend :) I'm sorry we disagree so strongly on this.