One of the points I'm trying to communicate is that there are skilled people in most parts of the world. They're less common outside SV, but that doesn't matter unless you're trying to hire at big tech campus scale. So you focus your much smaller efforts on recruiting those people with a good environment, give them the tools to produce work they're proud of. If you pay what they'll be happy with, it's almost always going to be vastly less than big tech pays.

That even works in the bay area, which is how places like Oxide keep fantastically skilled people despite paying below market rate.

Is it the easiest way to hire? No, but I never said it was.