The father wasn’t absent, nor was he remote. This kid had one of the largest, most robust families I’ve ever seen.
Your post indicated that the parents were divorced. A father not living in the home is absent regardless of visitation frequency.
What you saw from the outside is not what the child experiences from the inside. Pop psychology likes to talk about qualitative vs quantitative time, but the sad truth is, quality time requires quantity time. Being there for the critical moments requires that you actually be there because you cannot plan or forecast their time or place of occurrence or frequency.
Parenting is the only job where people aren’t fungible.