To be fair, when i worked at IBM Research (Watson), there were collaboration areas at the end of each hall.
They got used quite often, and there are plenty of times where someone noticed another team or person working on something and discovered it applied to what they were doing and collaborated.
One example from an area i know well - if you look at static single assignment form for compilers, which is the basis of all optimizing compilers these days, two people came up with the static single assignment part, but had no idea how to create it fast , and ran into some others whiteboarding control dependence for other reasons, and realized that it solved their problem.
They got used quite often, and there are plenty of times where someone noticed another team or person working on something and discovered it applied to what they were doing and collaborated.
One example from an area i know well - if you look at static single assignment form for compilers, which is the basis of all optimizing compilers these days, two people came up with the static single assignment part, but had no idea how to create it fast , and ran into some others whiteboarding control dependence for other reasons, and realized that it solved their problem.
This is why the paper (https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pingali/CS380C/2010/papers/ssaCyt...) has five authors and reads like one written by two different teams :)
I think the better argument is that it's not how newer generations seem to collaborate or operate, not that it never worked at all.
It definitely did work in the past.