Not everyone lives in Silicon Valley

I wish that were true but it's just not realistic to pay every engineer those kinds of salaries. Also, there's a lot of companies that employ software engineers where they are not in the SV market so they can't afford those kinds of salaries

To the extent this is true, remote work would average out wages across localities, not raise everyone's to match SV's.

Here in sunny Sydney, US$260k would cover the salary of three good developers, or two exceptional developers.