At the scale where hiring overseas workers make sense, there are atleast one PM, QA people, Ops - likely teams, not just one person per, involved. No one is releasing a feature to prod by lunch.

The workflow you propose is a very good representation of SMBs and they are behaving as you have proposed - hire one or two local devs from Austin, call them over Slack and release to prod by lunch.

So yes, this is happening, just wanted to point out that the "overseas workers" workflow is at a different scale of operations.

Internal turf wars, endless meetings to get “alignment” and pivoting on management’s latest whims are what slows feature delivery.

Because the amount of skill it takes to do that is not commensurate with a salary high enough to afford living in SF.