Does replacing daily standups with async updates actually save engineering time?

When our team grew to ten people, we spent the first hour of every morning in a live status sync, assuming everyone needed to hear what others were doing. While it felt collaborative, engineers frequently complained that it broke their deep-focus flow right at the start of the day. We recently dropped daily meetings entirely and switched to structured daily written updates in a shared channel. Team alignment stayed strong, and our developers gained back hours of uninterrupted coding time each week.

​Are daily live standups an unnecessary ritual for remote teams, or do video check-ins remain critical for maintaining team culture?