The honest answer is that online tarot and in-person tarot are not the same thing wearing different clothes, they are two related experiences with different strengths. One is not automatically better, but they lose and keep different things, and it helps to know which ones you actually care about.
What survives the screen
The cards survive. Their images, their traditional meanings, the way The Tower crashes into a spread you thought was going to be gentle, all of that arrives intact whether you are looking at a printed deck on a kitchen table or a rendered one on your phone. The symbolism does not degrade over wifi.
Your question survives, and honestly it matters more than the medium. A vague question gets a vague reading in a candlelit room just as easily as it does online, which is why we keep pointing people toward how to ask tarot questions before anything else.
Reflection survives too. The core mechanic of tarot, which is being handed a structured set of images and asked what they stir in you, works perfectly well alone at midnight with a screen. Some people are more honest with themselves when nobody is watching their face.
What quietly gets lost
Physical ritual goes first. Shuffling until your hands decide it is enough, cutting the deck, hearing the cards land, laying them out and sitting back to look at the whole shape of them on a table. That is a real part of the experience for a lot of people, and a tap on glass is not the same gesture even if the outcome is fair.
Presence goes second. A good in-person reader notices that your shoulders dropped when they mentioned your job, and follows that instead of the script. That kind of attentive, embodied reading of a person is genuinely hard to replicate, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.