It’s worked better for me in teams that work on open source. Such projects tend to be intrinsically asynchronous and conducted via email, chat etc which is what you need to make a distributed team work well.
Yeah, there's actually some Linux kernel research that looked at what mattered for collaboration and time zones wasn't one of the factors. My counter would be that the Linux kernel community is a very mature one that's very accustomed to working asynchronously so I'd be cautious about generalizing.
Yes, asynchronous communication is the key. The synchronous communication is conducted sparingly in opensource projects. Say, once per month (video conference).