Earlier quoted context omitted.
I seriously doubt that. Developing things is the same thing all around the globe. Just because you have worked five years building react apps in silicon valley (and from what I can tell, 250k total comp is reachable at that experience level) does not make you more skilled at building react apps than someone who also built react apps, say, in Barcelona. But you probably make 5 times as much, if not more. That's not be…
There is a difference between building a react app for your local bakery and building Facebook.com to scale. The experience in scaling products that big and that fast is concentrated and not evenly distributed.
But that's far away from the claim from above, that any 250k+ total comp developer from SV can outprogram good people from outside the US who don't make 250k+ total comp in basically any benchmark.
Most SV employees never have to solve these problems.
I picked frontend intentionally because it's probably the area that's the furthest away from these problems, but still compensated at 250k+ levels, if you work in SV for the right employers.
But even among backend engineers, most have never touched hard to parallelize problems. I'd argue that most (definitely not all) FAANG backend tasks are easily scalable. Implementing them still takes work, whch is done by most FAANG engineers. FAANG level tooling definitely helps, and while developing that tooling is hard, the people who have built such tooling are only a tiny subset of FAANG employees (regardless whether they are more skilled than the average FAANG employee or not).