Completely agree with you here. I think I should have been more clear in the original post as a whole bunch of commenters seem to be talking about situations in which you _could_ have got a local job, it'd just be a bit less well paid.
I'm talking about working remotely to escape a locally depressed job market which is very different (because in that situation you are relatively unique).
I moved from the Bay Area where my 1300sqft rental house would have cost me $1.2M, to work remote from a high-income community in Michigan where my 5000sqft house cost me $700k.
My neighbors are not poor, the schools are great, people are in a wide variety of professional and educational backgrounds (not just tech), and best of all, I live minutes away from my family and several of my best childhood friends, who I see every week.
You don’t need to move to the middle of nowhere for remote work to be a good idea, just anywhere even slightly more sane than the Bay Area. There’s loads of places all over the country that can strike a good balance here.