Take advantage of the fact that you can change companies to somewhere that provides you with enough compensation to live near your work. This might require a move. People have moved for work for centuries.
Moving is a burden of a highly varying degree. The implication that it is a non-factor points to a fundamental absence of shared experience between you and the people you are criticizing.
I have moved significantly more than the average person to do exactly what I’m talking about here. Without money, with money, without kids, with kids. I feel like I have a pretty reasonable amount of experience.
I work for a company that's fully distributed, and do ~2k miles a year, almost exclusively to visit family.
Your halfway-house "build your life around your career" mentality appealed to me in my early 20s when I was on starter salaries and was unmarried and childless. That is no longer the case and you couldn't - as I've had the pleasure of telling several interviewers - pay me to return to it.
I'll just pack up my family of four and move to a bachelor apartment to save the commute.
I choose to have a family, and I choose to work too, I suppose.
Maybe $JOB will provide me a raise to do so.