I was in SF until the pandemic and now live in another area of Northern California, but it's now just as expensive as SF was when I left in 2020. The catch 22 is that remote jobs may not last forever and the trade off is the cities near jobs have high cost of living and the cities with low cost of living have no/low paying jobs. Hard to know what the right thing to do is. Do my wife and I buy a house in a lower cost of living area and hope our jobs stays remote permanently? It's really just hard to know since there's no precedent for this. And if in 5 years everyone is now back in the office either full-time or part time, doesn't that mean prices will crash in those towns that went up in the pandemic?

That's true, but jobs outside of metro areas are nearly non-existent, or pay peanuts. Moving out of a metro area typically puts you in, maybe, a bigger home, but the pay is drastically lower. Food costs, internet, phone, vehicle, etc all cost nearly the same (if not more expensive), so you're probably doing even worse moving out of a metro area.