New England, and indeed much of the East Coast, is a far cry from the rest of the country. The width of the entire state of Massachusetts is smaller than the distance between some neighboring towns in the Midwest.
The difference is that they're not within daily/weekly commuting distances of tech centers as are many of the outlying areas of most tech centers--the Bay Area being something of an exception. So living there would be true remote working as opposed to just not living in a desired city core.
Also I don't have any GIS tools handy but I started poking around with google maps and 200 miles is a long way even in the west, It looks like all of Nebraska is within 200 miles of a 20k city, and so is almost all of Texas except maybe down by Big Bend.
That's true. I was a little surprised 1k is large enough to be considered a town.