I think one of the more obvious reasons is because companies genuinely believed in the benefit of geographical colocation. And Tech has largely been a winner ta

I think one of the more obvious reasons is because companies genuinely believed in the benefit of geographical colocation. And Tech has largely been a winner takes all industry, so paying large sums of more money to hire people is worth it because they payoff is huge, and if you're not #1 you're likely bust. For better or worse American Tech workers have decided to voluntarily give up (nay, aggressively demanded to get rid of) the geographical colocation advantage. Assuming the whole RTO movement doesn't work out (and with the resistance one can see I expect it not to, especially when office leases come up for renewals and decision makers are like, why pay for the office when we can sell not paying for it and offloading costs to workers as an advantage to them, and they're not coming in anyways), I suspect we will find out the truth of this hypothesis within a decade as American salaries converge with global salaries. That's assuming AI doesn't make us all unemployable of course.