My advice to you is that unless you are at the end of your career, or value working from home over your career prospects for family or health reasons, avoid working 100% remotely, even in fully distributed companies. The ideal is a situation where you work in an office, but have a flexible schedule where you can work from home 1-2 days a week, or 1-2 months a year.
However, I have worked remote for over 10 years in a 100% remote workforce and the company did not abandon me. BUT I did experience part of what you described: "(1) my networking opportunities plummeted to zero and...". This is the biggest potential downside IMO
>The ideal is a situation where you work in an office, but have a flexible >schedule where you can work from home 1-2 days a week, or 1-2 months a year.
This really should be the norm and encouraged practice at companies. I've posted this in other comments on this post, but if this became the norm I believe it would lead to less stress, better employee health, solve a lot of traffic problems - especially in IT where there is often no reason not to. You still get your face time for collab. Society would be better off. I really wish companies were incentivized to do this - especially in the bay area.
The real trick is to stay active in the industry; keep making contacts; attending meetups/conferences etc ; prioritize networking... Its too easy to be forgotten if you don't make those efforts.
I think we tend to make things black or white - remote is not the death of your career or something that cannot work. It just requires you to stay visible in the company and put a little more effort than usual toward networking and connections. Again, I think the ideal is remote/office split time. Spend a few days in the office and a few days WFH every week. I think this gives the best of both worlds (and something that I wish companies would embrace) and avoids a lot of the pitfalls of what you described.
I presume it's to prevent a throw away account editing an insightful comment into spam.
I'm actually in an arrangement of WFH 1 day a week right now. It helps a lot with my grueling commute, and gives me a day of mostly code work which is nice; but if there happens to be a need to schedule a meeting on that day, I feel that I concretely get less out of the meeting than I would if I was there personally with the team. Perhaps the team gets enough out of me from the meeting from what I have to say, so maybe it's fine, but I feel like if that happens a lot more often, I'd feel more and more out of touch with my team.
If one has to be in a certain geographical region for family reasons, it may be worth it to simply get a job locally, even if that pays less than what you would get at that remote job for some X tech company based in San Francisco but allows remote.
(The whole company doing this)