I think it depends on the team and your role. In many cases, much of your value comes from being a team member, not a lone wolf, which extends beyond your personal git commits. Sometimes being available to answer questions, remove blockers, review a proposal, etc., is simply more valuable to the team than you plugging away on a ticket for four hours in isolation. In other words, while you might feel more productive because your personal output in git is higher, your impact on the team's progress might actually be lower. Of course, this can also be taken too far to the point where you're always being distracted and can't do any substantial coding. The right balance depends on what the team is trying to accomplish.

I agree - but my own experience is remote workers working at home etc -> can have very high productivity.

Remote workers on vacation / traveling / visiting family -> low productivity.

That said, overall situation -> totally reasonable to bail out for the employee, clearly not a good fit overall. But for the last, new manager - they may not have had a good impression of employee given employee was themselves not treated properly by company before and the expectations they brought were out of the blue for new person.