How do people handle leave while being on remote and distributed? as in how do you let your colleagues know you are on leave - Slack status + Calendar blocking etc?

yup. Slack status (ideally mention when you’ll be back) and Calendar out of office blocking.

Slack status. And I leave a message to folks whom I'm working with at the moment so they know what to expect from me. It's always better to over-communicate. If its a planned leave, I calendar block and let the team know in the standup a day before my leave starts.

2 of the remote companies I worked with (including this one) use timetastic.co.uk which puts a message in the Slack channel as well. But inspite of this, slack update + standup update is the norm.

At GitLab we use https://www.tryroots.io/pto which is also integrated with our Gsuite Calendar, GitLab Status and HR portal so setting up unavailability is just a slack command away.

Thanks all for the inputs