People want to stay in those cities for a number of reasons

While generally speaking you are correct, the vocal majority of Reddit have made it very clear that it is because of the availability of jobs and higher incomes, not for other life goals. But if the jobs and higher incomes are truly that much better than the rest of the country as they like to claim, the housing premium is worth the cost, which invalidates their complaints about housing being too expensive.

Honestly you get one life and a limited amount of time to live it in. If you want to live it to accrue personal wealth that's cool. If you want to live it to maximize the most amount of happy moments that's cool too.

Absolutely. There is more to life than money, and if you are not trying to maximize for money, housing costs are still not really a concern. There are ways to make it work. Maybe you won't be able to own that nice detached home in the middle of the city, but if you're out living life and enjoying all the city has to offer, what kind of space do you really need? And you certainly don't need to own. Renting doesn't make you a failure.

When I was a youth in the 90s, we were told that university was the ticket. Get a degree – in anything – and all of life's struggles will disappear, and everything you could dream of will shower from the heavens. Don't get a degree and you'll be flipping burgers at McDonalds and living a struggling life of poverty. By the early 2000s it was becoming very clear that it doesn't work that way, even being reported in the media. Despite that, you still see people today clinging to those ideas that they learned as a child.

What I think is happening is that those who are a bit younger, those in the early-to-mid 20s now, didn't quite have the same kind sale of university put on them like we did, but instead learned that the big city was the land of opportunity. Now that we're seeing it doesn't work that way, we're getting the blowback from them like university got from my cohort. But, like university, shedding those learned ideas about what it takes to be successful is not done easily.