It is a fair question and practitioners disagree about it. The short answer is that most somatic work transfers to video better than people expect, and a specific slice of it does not.
What survives the screen
Most of the method, because most of the method is you noticing your own state while somebody skilled asks the right question at the right moment. That works fine through a camera.
Titration and pendulation survive. Resourcing survives. Orienting survives, and is arguably easier at home, where the room you are orienting to is one you will still be in afterwards.
The therapist can still see a great deal — face, breath at the shoulders, the pause before an answer, the moment your eyes go somewhere else. On a good connection that is most of what they were tracking anyway.
What genuinely degrades
Peripheral information. In a room, a practitioner picks up things they could not tell you they noticed: a shift in how you are holding the chair, a change in the air of the room. On video you get a head and shoulders in poor light.
Whole-body movement work is harder, though not impossible — it just needs deliberate framing rather than happening incidentally.
And co-regulation is thinner. Something real happens when a settled nervous system is in the room with an unsettled one, and video attenuates it. Nobody has measured how much. Practitioners who work both ways generally say it is noticeable and not disqualifying.
When to insist on in-person
If you dissociate substantially and have trouble coming back on your own. Being alone in a room afterwards is the risk, not the session itself.
If touch is going to be part of the work.
If your home is not private or not safe. Doing trauma work in a house where you can be overheard is not a technical limitation, it is a bad idea.
Making video work better
Put the camera far enough back that your therapist can see your torso, not just your face. Sit in a chair with your feet on the floor rather than on a bed. Use headphones, which makes the voice more present. Keep the ten minutes after the session free instead of returning straight to work — the transition is the part video removes, and you have to supply it yourself.
And say when the connection lags. Two seconds of delay changes the timing of everything in this method, and most people politely absorb it rather than mentioning it.