[bonoboTP]

There's truth in both. For countries with little research funding (Eastern Europe in my case), travelling to top conferences is often prohibitively expensive. Top AI conferences are regularly in places like Hawaii. This excludes many regions and those researchers must submit to lower tier conferences, or - as already commonly happens - they have to move to a richer country and do research there.

Remote conferences and lower publishing fees definitely help people at these underfunded places. But it is true that being there in person is still much more valuable. Informal face to face interaction at posters, joint dinners between different research groups, mingling during coffee breaks etc. are not replaceable by a Zoom Q&A.