Eh, iono. There are plenty of places with tech work outside of the bay area. And having a proven "works well remotely" on the resume seems likely to help find _other_ remote gigs down the road.
Limiting your job search to 100% remote is a great way to unexpectedly find yourself earning eastern European wages while paying midwestern U.S. living costs. Or, worse, being forced to change geography when the work dries up.
We all know "that guy" who moved his family cross-country, put the kids into new schools etc only to come back to the city a couple years later, when the "perfect" remote gig ended, or the single employer in Nowhere, KS eliminated their local technology group.
How does that claim not apply equally to moving to a city with a large employee pool like the Bay Area?
There is no guarantee that your competitors on a global market will face the same cost structure. Quite to the contrary -- they are very likely to have lower costs of living.
The caricatures of Middle America really never top, do they? Good developers in St. Louis, where I'm from, make six figures.
The GDP per capita in Romania (to pick a totally random example (it's literally just the first place I thought to check)) is $9,499. In Missouri it's $42,984.
There's this weird perception that the Midwest is like a third-world country, a perception that's plainly ignorant.