[mooreds]

I agree with your first point.

In my experience, it takes a special kind of junior engineer and a commitment from the company to have them mentored successfully in a remote environment. Whereas an in-person environment has tons of opportunities to learn not just the explicit skills (how to write a for loop on Python, how do deploy our software) but the implicit skills (how to move around the terminal, how to architect a solution in a consistent way). That's to say nothing of the knowledge osmosis that happens when you can overhear conversations about adjacent parts of the application. (Yes, you can make this all explicit and available online, but that is a culture shift.)

There are other ways to deal with these lacks (on-sites, focused on onboarding docs, regular office hours) but they take more effort. Whether they are worth the trade-off (you certainly have access to a wider pool of labor when you hire remote) depends on the company, industry, and job market.