The normalisation of remote hiring opened a market that had effectively been closed: an engineer in Lagos, Nairobi, Accra or Douala can now be employed directly by a company in another country, at a salary set by that country's market rather than by the local one.
For the individual, it is straightforwardly good
The pay difference is not marginal. It changes what an engineer can afford, what they can save, and how much risk they can take later — including the risk of starting something. A meaningful number of local companies are now funded by people who spent several years working remotely for foreign employers.
For local employers, it is a squeeze
A company selling in local currency cannot pay foreign-currency salaries and survive. It competes for the same engineers anyway. The usual responses — equity, interesting work, seniority sooner, flexibility — help, but they compete against a number, and the number is large.
The practical effect on local companies has been to push hiring towards more junior engineers and to invest in training, which is healthy in the long run and expensive in the short one, especially when the engineer becomes attractive to a foreign employer at exactly the point they become productive.
The part that is genuinely lost
Working remotely for a company in another timezone is often isolating and rarely comes with the sort of mentorship that a good local team provides. It also means the engineer's best work compounds into someone else's product. A generation of senior engineers whose experience sits inside foreign codebases is a real cost to the local ecosystem, even as it is an obvious gain for the individuals.
Neither side of this is going to be argued away. It is simply the market that now exists, and local companies that plan around it do better than those who wish it were otherwise.