I agree with what you say, and just validates what I think and heard over and over again for many years - off shoring isn't worth it for most of the use cases. In long run, it's at least as expensive if not more, the issue with time zones, communication and just doing everything is too much to counter the low savings which are not usually even there.

the only case I can think of is if you need an army of developers and for some regulatory reason cannot find them / bring them locally.

I'll take anytime mediocre dev that sits next to me to some remote superior dev, since all we do is a team effort that actual coding of lines of code is quite small part of.