The people I worked with were pretty distributed before COVID--partially because functions (and geo regions) were distributed anyway--and partly for other reasons. When COVID hit there was basically very little effort to co-locate most teams. Some companies did try to pull people back but in a lot of cases, it was a matter of RTO but that was a good way to do a mass layoff. Many companies didn't want to do that.

I did (and sometimes still do) attend professional events but the level of interpersonal-contact pre-COVID was gone long before I semi-retired.