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This has more to do with urbanization/centralization than with spending habits. A handful of firms headquartered in global cities are increasingly eating the world; this is making those cities expensive by increasing the importance of living in one of them.

All the San Francisco complainers could likely find living-wage jobs and houses in what's left of America's small towns and stagnant cities, and choose not to. You're right. But IT jobs only exist in Middle America because the Bay Area and Seattle cloud companies haven't gotten to them yet. If you want to be on the forefront of your industry and on the right side of history, you probably need to do it from a place where homeownership is growing further and further out of reach to mere professionals.

In those cities, the few thousand dollars a year you could save by cutting the restaurant meals and travel don't make a meaningful difference in your ability to amass as $200k down payment or plop down a $1m cash offer (increasingly necessary to win a bid).