Hahah I literally had this same exact thing happen to me. I was leaving from Tokyo to India and I was so used to getting visa on arrival, when they asked me to show my visa, I was just like "Huh?"
So they wouldn't let me board my flight. I ended up just applying for the Indian visa at the airport and then booked a flight to Taiwan for the week instead to wait it out until I got the visa approved.
Yeah I currently make over 150K/year full remote, international included, but in my case I started at a third of that, at the same company, non-remote, and worked extremely hard for a few years before asking to go remote.