As usual, I think 37S is mostly correct here, but they've omitted some crucially important qualifiers. I often wonder whether this is genuine myopia/naïveté, or whether they are crafting a subtext that serves their larger PR and marketing goals (i.e. obviously this can't work everywhere and in all cases, but look how close our realities are to our idealized case! Oh and by the way sign up for our services because they will solve your problems!).

Anyway, I've worked on and managed distributed teams, spread over 14hrs of timezones. What I've learned is:

You need good people. They need to take absolute responsibility for their work, and they need to be highly cooperative and reliably honest. They need to care.

You need the _right_ good people. They need to be professionally fulfilled by the high quality of their work as well as the team's work. They need enough adulthood or experience to do all the little things to compensate for the reduced bandwidth, like spending an extra 30 seconds on commit messages or ticket updates. They need to make the extra effort, sometimes.

They need to get their human quota of social interaction, status affirmation, deep bonding, etc elsewhere. They need to want to get stuff done at work and have another healthy center of life gravity somewhere else. It's probable and hopeful that the team will all become friends, but there's just too much drama and/or inefficiency if the team constitutes a member's whole social circle.

You need need a strong and coherent plan, especially around product vision and strategy. If things are still very fluxy or in-pivot, and you need everyone to be highly cooperatively creative, then there's no substitute for getting everyone together and eliminating all of the communications friction and overhead. Once the plan is internalized, you can disperse. Minor perturbations can be handled remotely. Major ones suggest reconvention.

You need good leadership. This can be de facto or even cooperative, but someone needs to take organizational and facilitating roles, and the rest of the team needs to have a focal point. Obviously if you are a team under some umbrella of org chart, this needs to be the titular manager, and he or she has to manage upwardly even more actively than within.

...

The absolute hardest part is hiring those good, right people. The technology is 100% there (and I think the 37S suite is OK but generally end up falling back to lighter weight options).

Remote work attracts the highly professional and the highly useless. If you're hiring people without a trusted recommendation, differentiating between the two can be difficult. You're looking for people who are talented and scrupulously honest, especially about weaknesses. People who are lying to you are often lying to themselves, and people who are lying to themselves are always lying to you. There's no place for that in a distributed team.

It's very important to cut quickly when you fail with a hire. There's no shame in not being the right person for a job, but it's the hiring manager's duty to take improvement very very seriously. The highly professional will not tolerate bad teammates under these special-needs circumstances, nor the bad management that permits them.

When remote teams fail, it's because management and hiring have failed. It's not so much harder as different -- but different is hard, for some styles of managers.