I think this is often the reasoning of management, however, what they don't see is that developer skill often follows a power law and the flow state is a multiplier on top of that. The cost of a midday check-in is not the cost of how much you pay that developer per hour because developers work output per time is nonlinear.
I believe the flow state is why it's so easy to believe the idea of the 10x engineer, we've all experienced the feeling of flying through code without barriers, and we have all felt the below average days where you may be tired and just can't quite load all that complexity into your head to get any real work done. So we believe that there are people out there who are so skilled that they exist in this flow state all the time.
Yes, developers should work on themselves to rely less on a state of flow to be high performers, but even so there will always a benefit to being "in the zone".
I believe the flow state is why it's so easy to believe the idea of the 10x engineer, we've all experienced the feeling of flying through code without barriers, and we have all felt the below average days where you may be tired and just can't quite load all that complexity into your head to get any real work done. So we believe that there are people out there who are so skilled that they exist in this flow state all the time.
Yes, developers should work on themselves to rely less on a state of flow to be high performers, but even so there will always a benefit to being "in the zone".