I don’t understand your comment. Saying “there’s risk in everything” is vacuous. Which scenario generally has less risk?

Obviously, remote jobs are less plentiful than on-site jobs. Jobs in small municipalities are less plentiful than jobs in dense urban areas, for software work and most other types of work. Jobs tied to one single, small municipality are pretty idiosyncratic and don’t change that much (with employers uprooting and leaving being the most common type of change).

There are many reasons why living in smaller towns or rural America can be a great thing. Diversification of employment risk factors is absolutely not one of them, and this is an aspect of working remotely while based in a rural location that carries huge risks.

I'm simply saying that you seem to be characterizing remote work as some unique existential risk, which I don't think it is, though certainly the density of local jobs is one factor I would consider if moving to take a new opportunity or on my own volition when working remotely.

Also, as I wrote in another comment, escaping to the country doesn't need to be the back of beyond. The Bay Area is somewhat different because of geography but there are many cities with a reasonable number of tech jobs where you can drive 45 minutes and be in a relatively rural environment.

Personally that's what I do. I'm mostly remote and live in a fairly rural town but I'm within an hour of a major metro and I even commuted into the city for a while.

We might be talking past one another, because I was talking about the OP's main topic, which was remote jobs specifically in rural areas. I understood this to implicitly be talking about locations where it was specifically not possible to drive a reasonable or even semi-long commute distance and find yourself in a high-density urban center.

Taking a remote job when you already live in a city or when you live within a reasonable drive of some other job center would mitigate a lot of the risk I am describing. I am only talking about specifically using a remote job as license to move to a highly isolated, rural area not within commutable distance to a big job center.

The OP and other comments seem to describe this as a wholly positive ideal, and in many ways I can agree. But I felt an important part of the discussion is that if you use a single specific remote job as license to move to e.g. rural Wyoming and live on a ranch with DSL internet, you're setting yourself up for trouble, because it's actually not easy to find a new job in a pinch like that.

The OP asked about moving to the countryside in general. Which you can do with reduced (though not minimized) costs without moving to rural Wyoming. I actually agree that, while moving to a mountaintop somewhere may still be a reasonable option for some people, you can mitigate risk considerably by moving to the outskirts of a general metro area that also has local options.