I mean depends on the team but approximately:

1. Discuss high level initiative

2. Write tickets with coarse descriptions

3. Have team refine tickets (define scope + estimate)

4. Prioritize work and assign tasks

> How will an issue tracker help a team coordinate on a complex problem that needs to be worked through as a group?

Do you have an example where you think that a complex problem can't be broken into tasks and solved this way? I can understand with ongoing incidents maybe you need to solve them as a group in a time-sensitive manner, but those are rare events and the world's large companies have been solving them in distributed ways anyway so I don't think this is a remote vs. in-person problem.

> How does moving a ticket to a different status help you connect with the people you work with to build social capital you then spend on conflict? Who is coordinating and lubricating these interactions constantly because natural human interaction isn’t there to do it?

Honest question here: have you really had this problem at work? I think this is a pretty toxic situation to be in if you need to build social capital to solve conflicts. I really don't want to work in an environment where people are fighting hard enough to warrant needing social capital to get them through the discussions.

> Your comment feels like the comment a person might make if they thought building a cohesive team was a paint-by-the-numbers exercise.

It approximately is honestly. There are some small differences I'm sure, but it seems somewhat narrow-minded to focus on the relatively small differences when the vast majority of problems are universal (coaching/mentorship, working with stubborn/difficult personalities, removing single points of failure, giving people opportunities to advance their careers, etc.).