[notacoward]

That's perhaps phrased a bit less charitably than necessary, but gets at an important truth. People who rely too much[1] on these non-verbal cues are, more often than not, doing so because they're not adept verbally. It's kind of like a fortune teller, who of course does not know you or your future but can put up a pretty convincing front by observing responses to their initial probes. I see it a lot among people for whom English is not their first language, just as I see the same people make just about any excuse to get out of writing anything down permanently. Since effective remote work also has to be asynchronous work as much as possible, I'd say these people need to work on their own language skills instead of complaining about how the online experience doesn't perfectly support their coping strategies.

[1] How much is "too much"? There's plenty of room for debate, but a decade of alone-remote and a year of all-remote made it pretty clear that it's a threshold many of my colleagues at multiple companies exceed.