I’ve seen it work exactly once.

The guy was absolutely brilliant, however. And a great communicator. But everything had to be done asynchronously for the most part, except a few slots where he was guaranteed to have good network and be able to hop on a conference call. He was also a performance advocate, since everything had to work great on his laptop with poor network and contributed several patches to make the dev experience better. He was a stellar communicator with emails and knew the codebase really well and since he responded in batch he gave a lot of context in his responses (because he wouldn’t often know what the response would be for another day or two).