Once you've worked in a environment with healthy technical interaction on an organic basis it's qualitatively and quantitatively better than a group of remote workers. There is so much shared information that is lost when you can't just strike up a conversation.
But even for fully on-site teams the preferred format of a "knowledge base" is digital (wiki, Google Docs, etc.), because it's something that lasts, can be improved over time and is always accessible. And having the discussions stored digitally (Github issues, emails) is also usually preferred because it's "asynchronous" and it's something that can be looked up in the future.
So on-site teams also use Wikis/issue trackers/emails a lot. The difference is that instead of a face-to-face chat remote teams have to use Slack. Which is also largely used in on-site teams... So my point is that some of the modern IT offices already resemble a "co-working" space because all the tools are already digital, and all meaningful knowledge sharing already happens in the digital space.
Once you've worked in a environment with healthy technical interaction on an organic basis it's qualitatively and quantitatively better than a group of remote workers. There is so much shared information that is lost when you can't just strike up a conversation.