I know this is more anecdata, but I'm from Ohio and worked on a joint project with a couple of New York devs at #{famous company}. They were very good, and I learned a lot from them, but I could definitely hold my own with them technically (as could another senior dev from my company). We're both family men in the Midwest with no desire to move. Even if you offered me $350,000 or whatever I'm still staying here. But I would obviously take a remote job with #{famous company} if it paid 60-70% of that and I felt like I wouldn't be a second-class citizen as a remote dev.
Super underrated comment. What's even worse is that, internally, large companies have small groups that create bespoke solutions and then try to sell those solutions to the rest of the company. I've seen so many "final frameworks" that are going to solve all of the problems that are then sold to all of the other groups, who try to move their stuff onto that framework, but wait now Team X has another framework and oh man which one should we follow? It's just a new version of the fundamental problem of getting diverse human groups with diverse needs to standardize on some solution, with all of the economic incentives you described mixed in. Frankly I think the people who got this problem closest to right were the American Founding Fathers. This is fundamentally a political problem. The best technical solution I've seen proposed is in the talk "Architecture Without an End State," where the speaker talks about how to make smart decisions in a decentralized environment.