We noticed this as well. Now we come in at least once a week. Is there any way that the same level of speed of collaboration can be achieved remotely? We use all sorts of tools but we've not been able to achieve that kind of productivity and it honestly irks me.
Couple this with a more instant communication form, ie voice chats, and there isn't much else to need when it comes to collaboration. With the added benefit of async communication, you can leave notes to each other on the board/build off things without having to actually be together at the same time.
I will note that if you have a tablet and compatible pen (with app support), it makes it all feel so intuitive. But some people get into the flow of clicking and dragging components with text it's not a big difference.
with a physical whiteboard, you get to do your own getto animation. Do you want to express the flow of data/requests in a service? easy, just draw them as you're expressing them. Do you want to express a node replacing a node, draw the arrows, use an eraser and you're done. You've essentially created the "animation" part in real life without any need to learn or know "animation" software which is too complicated.
in 2020 when we were all forced to work from home, I bought a really expensive Wacom tablet thinking that I can use that to replace a white board. The logistics of it all was just too complicated. telling everyone on the meeting "wait, shut up. let me grab my tablet. Let me connect my tablet. Let me share my screen. Can you see my screen? let me start drawing. Can you see my drawing? oh I'm drawing too fast and you can't see the arrow's direction? oh sorry I'm not used to drawing on a tablet. I'm pointing to "this". Can you see "this"? what do you see? no that's not what I was pointing at. I'm point at "this" not at "that". Let me disconnect and connect again."
might as well just cancel the project and look for another job.
The scene has got substantially better, to the point where your situation is actually quite overcomplicated. You don't screen share anymore, most of these apps support multiple people on it at the same time and have indicators for what they're focused on/adding to (their cursors). If you do want to use a tablet, and I do, I just connect to the app on my iPad to draw on, while still using my macbook to view the document as a whole/indicate what part I'm really focusing on/keep the voice chat going/etc. There's no lag or slowdown, and I only have a 100mb connection, it's not as if it's transferring an entire netflix movie to me.
COVID has substantially improved so much remote work, it's unfortunate a lot of that has been clouded due to experiences early on from the rushed forced implementations!