It is different. Yes, there are some colleagues with whom I have regular online contact, some of them I really only got into contact with during the pandemic. We have regular calls and exchanges.
But I also have a lot of colleagues, which I don't have close contact with and contact to those has mostly evaporated during the pandemic. That are those people, I might talk to when meeting them in the coffee room, but really no reason to call outside of that or vice versa.
Speaking of coffee rooms, they have another important property: it is very nice, even healthy, to leave your desk from time to time and both take a break for your mind and your body from work. In the office you walk to the coffee room in that time and there you meet people in the same phase. They are taking a break and you don't interrupt each others work when having a chat. In a sense, online social contact can be very disruptive, as when you start an online interaction, you don't know whether your recipient is willing for an interrupition or not.
Of course, there are ways to arrange that too, but things aren't just black and white and interactions are complex.
> In the office you walk to the coffee room in that time and there you meet people in the same phase. They are taking a break and you don't interrupt each others work when having a chat.
Except those whose assigned desks happen to be close to the coffee room/kitchen. That's the problem with the way offices have been designed - there is always going to be some subset that has less than ideal conditions.
The worst open office setup I saw a year before the pandemic had a conference room with no door, just a big pane of glass and a gap in the glass to enter. There were desks outside this conference room (like everywhere else on the floor) which meant whoever had to sit there was subjected to meetings and speakerphone all day long.
Where I work, the coffee room is pretty isolated. My office is actually the closest one, but I can close the door. When I am talking about the advantages of offices, I am thinking of good offices. No doubt that bad offices are almost always worse than working from home. Unfortunately, many companies have no idea (at least their upper management), about what makes a "good office". Otherwise the nonsense of "open space" would have stopped long ago.
Speaking of coffee rooms, they have another important property: it is very nice, even healthy, to leave your desk from time to time and both take a break for your mind and your body from work. In the office you walk to the coffee room in that time and there you meet people in the same phase. They are taking a break and you don't interrupt each others work when having a chat. In a sense, online social contact can be very disruptive, as when you start an online interaction, you don't know whether your recipient is willing for an interrupition or not. Of course, there are ways to arrange that too, but things aren't just black and white and interactions are complex.