I’ve always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.
Agatha Christie
I’ve always believed
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I think it does depend on the people. I’m co-writing a series with someone right now and we are having so much fun. We energize each other and enjoy how the worlds are evolving. It started as a lark and has turned into a real partnership that is flowering into other benefits I would have never guessed. So – maybe? Lol, sometimes you get lucky and find a match to how your brain works.
Perhaps not a collaboration within the meaning of the act, but Christie did participate, as a member of the Detection Club, in the authorship of a round-robin mystery novel* called The Floating Admiral with fellow members such as Dorothy Sayers and G. K. Chesterton. She wrote the first chapter, though, so she wasn’t so much collaborating as setting things in motion.
*I.e., they took turns writing one chapter each, with no outline, and the last writer had to come up with the solution.
James S.A. Corey seems to do fine (Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck).
By their own accounts, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote well together. Got the bestsellers to prove it.
In SF&F there are dozens of successful partnerships both in olden times and recent ones.
And then there is Patterson’s book mill.
Not all authors are incapable of cooperation and shared visions.
I’ve seen very few people that were in sync enough to do something like that together. It does happen, but there are far more bad pairings than good.