I have been building and managing remote (+ async) teams since 2018 (way before pandemic), and the biggest breakthrough came in only after a year of struggles. The breakthrough was:
Spend 10x more time evaluating cultural fit, and you'll spend 10x less time managing people.
This allowed me to simply trust every single person, and let go of the processes and daily meetings/standups, etc.
Simply trusting + communicating in weekly timelines kept everybody calm and productive.
This presupposes standups were for you (the manager) in the first place, but they were/are not.
They're for the developers to keep in sync. For tiny teams (1-2 developers) that's trivial and doesn't need a shared conversation. For 3+ people to try and keep in sync, it's easier if they all get together.
Sure, they can stay in sync other ways, but it's more likely that you lose productivity to people de-doing work, having trouble integrating, and losing out on developer experience when someone takes on a new problem.
The real red flag here is that your team doesn't want to talk to one another on a daily cadence. Sounds like a team that isn't really a team, to me, just a bunch of individual developers being managed by the same person.
Spend 10x more time evaluating cultural fit, and you'll spend 10x less time managing people.
This allowed me to simply trust every single person, and let go of the processes and daily meetings/standups, etc.
Simply trusting + communicating in weekly timelines kept everybody calm and productive.