places like Charles Town, Martinsburg, and Cumberland MD are really wonderful, beautiful, but economically depressed communities. It's not quite Boise or Austin, but towns like this would be really attractive to a certain group of remote workers (esp. those with homesteading or kayaking/fishing/hiking aspirations) if they only knew about them.

There's a weird tension between this kind of story, and the RTO stories.

I think we're supposed to read this story as "virtuous rural communities attract our smartest people", and the RTO stories as "centralized monitoring of day to day physical work is good actually". These don't quite line up. I suppose that's because even oligarch owned or aligned media is not a unified bloc, but there's still a little cognitive whiplash involved.