This is absolutely not true for a vast part of the PNW. For example, with Verizon, I've bailed myself out of several situations where the alternative would be - wait (nobody showed up in the time we were waiting for help when we called, so hours more at least) or walk 20+ miles.

I've also been in a situation where if we did not have a sat phone in our group, someone very well may have died from heat stroke/way to many sunburns.

That's assuming someone stops. A while ago I was driving down a road like you describe in the rural pnw and stopped for a person attempting to flag down traffic. They'd gotten their vehicle locked behind a DNR gate and their phone was dead. They were ridiculously grateful because they'd been trying to flag someone down for over an hour and had been ignored by dozens of vehicles, and they didn't even look sketchy or anything. Goes back to the societal assumption that everyone has a working phone: "if there's cell service, why don't they just call someone?"

> The places so remote you cannot flag someone down are also so remote that you don't have cell service.

What an absurd claim.