That sounds... horrendous. I really enjoy "pairing" when chasing down bugs, but doing that when trying to write new features would be nigh-on impossible.
I was really skeptical at first, but we've been doing it for over a year now and I've come to thoroughly enjoy it. I find that I get stuck on issues much less frequently because I have other people to talk through them, knowledge transfer is inherent, and when you have multiple people writing and reviewing the code as it's written PR reviews become basically instant and you can deploy much faster.
I'm thinking of it more like team practice in a sport - it sounds like a way to get some team cohesion and pass around some knowledge in a group setting. You aren't going to be doing this all the time but it doesn't sound like the worse thing to do for an hour - people aren't exactly going to lunch together when remote.