I met a whole bunch of people who want to be a dev because it pays well. Most of them need constant supervision.
Society has to accommodate for workers that bomb interviews and that you would never hire on your team even if your particular company has the luxury of pretending they don't exist.
Most people aren't inherently motivated by their jobs, and I'd say this applies even more in office settings. Work is work, "work / life balance" exists because work is the obligation that pays for life. If this is indicative of how America as a whole feels, then this has everything to do with remote work.
Anecdotally, if the work environment is healthy (i.e., not open office trash), I think everyone benefits. I personally think remote is a good option if collocation is not possible--but not preferred.
I myself try to hire for devs that don't need supervision because we're all adults here and being a nanny isn't something I'm interested in. I prefer trusting others to do their work in a timely manner, and if that trust is broken, we move on.
The first few weeks will tell you if they're going to work out or not, and if not, it's better for all involved to move on quickly. They will either perform their duties as an adult, which includes working without constant oversight, or they won't. And if they can't do so, out they go before the probationary period is over, because you can't train someone to care.
One source of variability: some care about impact on coworkers, some don't. Guess who will upset you more. Intrinsic/extrinsic is orthogonal to this.
Sounds like you got intrinsic and extrinsic mixed up, at least unknowingly.
Have you met kids? Many (most?) of them have an innate curiousity which is not hard to channel into a passion for learning given they get to learn things they enjoy, and if you tell them how well they're doing, they can get quite competitive about doing better.
Self-motivation wasn't instilled by a system of proscribing to kids what and how they had to learn, but that doesn't mean a system can't be built around nurturing it.
