To me this looks like the practices that led to the High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation of 2013 are still going on. The market is still broken. Companies

To me this looks like the practices that led to the High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation of 2013 are still going on. The market is still broken. Companies that have this policy are only free to pay "cost of living" based salaries because the companies that are offering remote work aren't competing with each other. Like you said, they are only competing with the local startups in the cities where remote workers live.