Outsourcing is realistically often a tool to get mass, not for cost.

There’s a reason so many people went to coding boot camps, there was a huge demand for developers. Here in Germany for quite a while you literally couldn’t get developers, unless you paid outrageous salaries. There were none. So if you needed a lot of devs, you had the chance to either outsource or cancel the project.

I actually talked to a manager about our “near shoreing” and it wasn’t actually that much cheaper if you accounted for all the friction, but you could deliver volume.

BTW: there’s a big difference between hiring the cheapest contractors you can find and opening an office in a low income country. My colleagues from Poland, Estonia and Romania were paid maybe half what I got, but those guys are absolutely solid, no complaints.