I absolutely loved this article. It’s funny you didn’t mention your expert use of the drinking mug! I have fond memories of that one dialogue in City of Mist where my character’s mother was obnoxiously sipping tea.
I never considered how the organized way that our online sessions go was inheret to the experience, even though it totally is.
One thing that I like to use is image links, especially when I’m running an IP like Pokémon or Digimon. I say the name of the mon the players are meeting, post the link in chat, and bam, no need to grasp for words in how to describe a living plant thing with a flower on its head that is cute and creepy at the same time.
You mention the whispers in chat, and I’m a big chat user. It can be used to unobtrusively ask rules clarifications, make jokes and puns, and telegraph your character’s actions or scenes you want to see next. Pasión de Las Pasiones’ audience mechanic (where the players who aren’t in a scene describe how the family watching the telenovela we’re creating react) gains a whole new life in chat. The side chat becomes like an entire minigame going on in the sidelines, and it’s a ton of fun. I’m even thinking on how to bring that into other games (gods watching over the adventuring party and gambling on their fate? Surveillance agents commenting on the investigators’ progress? Aliens monitoring the inside of the spaceship?)
Another benefit of online play is that we can look up information rather quickly, since we only need to open a new tab. In recent games my groups had to find out if the Anglican church has nuns and when did the US Senate first have a female senator, and we managed to do that with little hassle.
Also, since we can use custom dice sizes in online rollers, we can go for some really wild rolls without having to mix and match dice and worry about how the probability curve changes.
