> If that were true, San Francisco developers wouldn’t already be competing with contractors in Bangalore and Bucharest. They are - yet the jobs remain, because employers value capability, not postcode.

Well, it's not just capability. I know people who had offers at Big Tech, but had to move. There was no option to work from Bucharest or Eastern Europe. You either move to the US or to some other country like UK or Germany. Even if the job is remote. For legal and accounting reasons apparently. I know someone who officially rented a tiny space in rural Germany then secretly worked remotely from Poland, because they needed the official address for paperwork. So there are many artificial hurdles as of now. But the more normalized remote work becomes, the more people will realize these rules don't make sense.