It sounds like most of your issue is not with the fact that you worked remote but that you worked remote and lived in a remote area. It is certainly possible to work remote and live close to where the action is. Example... you may live in Boston and work remote for a company in Silicon Valley. I know people who work remote but go to meetups at night all the time.
You don't need to network in person to network. I've never been to a meet-up in my life and manage to interact with hundreds of people on GitHub through side projects / open source work. If you put yourself out there constantly, good things will happen. Don't fool yourself into thinking moving to a city is a magic bullet. You can be just as isolated in the middle of a city.
This was also my experience. When the time has come to find a new jobs, I found the new position through people I met working on an open source project.
