If you live in Omaha where tech salaries for the best of the best top out at $70-80k, but you're making $175k at Gitlab, it's going to take a lot to get you to leave.
Honestly the thing that bothers me most about all this "fairness" stuff if the implication that business is supposed to be fair in the first place. Salary negotiation is a leverage and your/the company's BATNA. That's why software developers can make $200k in certain areas and janitors make minimum wage. Yes, value provided to the company has something to do with it. Yes, scarcity of skill has something to do with it. But all those just flow into the equation of leverage and BATNA and you come out the other end with a range, and where you fall on that range is largely just your negotiating skill and whether or not you're willing to negotiate in the first place.
That being said, if you live in Omaha, and working for GitLab, you're going to need to be executive/director level to be making $175k. FrontEnd manager? $110, tops. Security manager, $130, tops.
I disagree. If I was making 175k in a city like that, I would probably work for a few years, then semi-retire. Maybe take a nonprofit job, do less hours and consult, or work for a local university with low pay but good work life balance. I wouldn't just ride it out for 10-20 years if I didn't enjoy the job.
If you're mid career and had aggressively saved prior to acquiring 400k, you could totally take up some sort of minimum wage gig to pay for insurance while your nest egg goes or take a nonprofit job.
That's my definition of "semi retirement", maybe yours is different.
There are many counter examples of companies paying equal regardless of the location and:
1. Not everyone lives where it cheap. There are many factors when choosing where to live: Friends, family, emotional attachment to a place, ...
2. That's linked to 1, if they choose to move somewhere expensive that's on them, not imposed by the company.
3. Not true, someone unhappy isn't going to stick around just because they can make more money.
...
At the end of the day the main goal of paying less where the cost of living is cheaper is to increase the company profit. It's 100% reasonable but masking the reason behind some "fairness" bullet points is BS to me.