I agree most of the time it is much better to have a face-to-face meeting but it is just not feasible many times. Work and communications are global today, you meet and deal with people from all over professionally and due to physical distance and schedules there just may be no other way.
I completely agree you get much more from a face-to-face meeting, you are able to connect better and get those contextual facts you can hardly get on a video conference, also, when technology fails, it is really a pain in the ass to try to have the meeting ongoing.
My take is to try to have personal meetings with new people for the first time, to me, a first meeting is key in many senses and I try to have it face-to-face if possible, once a first meeting is done, the rest can be online if schedules are hard to match.
You're right, it's not always feasible if people are not in the same location, quite clearly. I think my point is more about people relying on digital communication when they do not need to because, quite obviously, there's times when it is required; a time and place for both as I said in my post I suppose.