Outside of family obligations, nothing is forcing people to live in the Bay Area to begin with, they choose to do that willingly because they prioritize their careers above everything else. There's no rule saying everyone must live in the Bay Area. You can find a tech job in more affordable cities as well, just that it might not be your dream job at a company that pampers you. People cramming like sardines in tech-hubs is precisely the problem that remote work can alleviate. Now, the speculation driven housing problem is another issue on its own though.
If I zoom out for a broader picture, and looking at it from a cold, hartless, games theory perspective, devs in the Bay Area making less money so that devs worldwide, especially in developing nations, make more money, feels like a worthy sacrifice for the good of the planet/mankind. Same thing happened to manufacturing and it might happen to certain parts of SW development.
Nothing is stopping the Bay Area tech workers from unionizing and getting better protection against remote workers from abroad taking their jobs at lower wages. They're certainly a hefty majority there and they could do it if they wanted to, but so far they choose to pursue individualism because "I can make more money than others by negotiating for myself; fuck you I got mine, you go get yours".
Or who knows, maybe a push for unionization would actually accelerate the move to globalized remote work. This coming decade will be interesting.
How so? I though it was supposed to improve inequality. As in you didn't have to be a Stanford grad, or be born in the US, or live in unaffordable places like Amsterdam, London or the Bay Area, to get access to good jobs?
So now some hard working individual from India or Vietnam who didn't win the lottery of birth can also get a good job too if he proves himself worthy, and also it will ease some of the housing pressure on those uber-expensive tech-hub cities.
That all sounds to me like a global net benefit for the greater good of humanity. Is it not?
Now if your only moat was physical proximity, but not your skillset, well then ... tough, I guess, but I don't think this is a problem, TBH.
Workers in rich western nations have plenty of other lucrative career prospects with moats around them if that's what they want: law, medicine, investment banking, defense and other government jobs, etc. People who went into tech because of passion, will be fine either way.