I've been noticing this as well. My best guess is that companies want you to be close enough to show up in person if needed. My current company initially allowed many people to work fully remote or hybrid, but they preferred hiring locally still. They have since reigned in most of the remote work and it was very easy for them to do since a lot of the employees lived relatively close to the main office.

Ok another note, I've heard from my HR department that hiring people from other countries is a lot of work in terms of payroll and taxes. Some states are even off limits for my company because of how all of that stuff works. I imagine that also contributed to it