I think the length is what’s important. For a long time, my team’s stand ups were going 30-45 minutes and most of it felt pointless (or were discussions that should’ve been on smaller meetings). When I got control over them, I made sure they’re 20 minutes max and I’ll cut people off if they’re talking too long about something only a few people need to input on. Now no one has an issue with the stand up and it’s helped us catch stuff that might’ve been missed otherwise.

My experience is similar; the projects with daily stand-ups are well coordinated and people remain informed while projects without become chaotic and the people become clueless rapidly.

no one was reading it and we became desynchronized really quickly

This sounds like an issue with your team and not the process of having a thread approach. If people just ignored the daily standup meeting, like they did the thread, they would also become de-synchronized quickly.

That was our meeting before covid, but suddenly it became a 2-3 hours meeting every Monday morning. It's a nice way to drain your whole energy to start the week

Yeah, had a similar experience in a place I worked where people wrote in slack the things for the day. It was too much and too noise too and people would not read or care. It's too annoying and people felt disconnected anyway.

The important thing is really to have a strong arm and focus on the time. I think all the problems I ever had and they were solved in dailes was exactly because someone was enforcing time and not allowing others to say too much or derail the daily in useless details of their tasks or problems.