In my understanding when you move away from hot-spots like San Francisco it is not your skill that loses value, but you that lose power in asking for an higher

In my understanding when you move away from hot-spots like San Francisco it is not your skill that loses value, but you that lose power in asking for an higher salary. Also it is not that devs in SF are especially good; I would guess that the distribution of skill is power law (specifically the number of devs in the global n-th percentile as a function of the total number of devs in the hiring pool) and it might be argued that the competitions is counterbalancing any positive effect of that. In the end it is a position of which job market do you want to be in.