I left San Jose as a kid, leaving behind family who remain in San Francisco and Palo Alto. I only miss my relatives and the easy access to places like Lassen and some of the national forests. The rest can slide off into the ocean.
Ultimately I wound up in Brevard County, FL. (the "Space Coast") There are actual tech jobs here, at least for US citizens without drug issues or out-of-control debt, and engineers make up a very large portion of the population. Business here revolves around aerospace, cyberwar, and train automation. You can work for Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Thales, L3 Harris, Cromulence, Collins Aerospace, Rincon Research Corporation, Securboration, GE Transportation, Infoscitex, Alstom, Radgov... you get the picture. My place: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19797601
It's affordable. Gasoline is going for about $2.60 now. There is no income tax. If you aren't fussy and don't need a big place, $60,000 should get you a house less than half a mile from work. Nicer 3-bedroom places get up to more like $200,000. I got a 3500 square foot 4-bedroom place less than a mile from the beach, which goes for about $400,000 now. My commute is 3 minutes by car or 20 minutes if I walk. An experienced person with a tech job can afford a McMansion or a dock (canal ultimately goes to ocean) or a multi-acre property with horses.
It fits my style. I made 12 kids. I can't really picture that in the Bay Area, though somebody probably manages.
It might not fit your style. Brevard County most definitely has a different culture than the Bay Area. If you are comfortable with the Bay Area, you'd slam hard into culture shock. This is a place that had two packed Trump rallies despite a low population density to draw from. This is a place where people go hunting for alligator, deer, pig, squirrel, and frog. (to eat) This is a place where our elected sheriff (a culture shock in itself) Wayne Ivey deputized a bunch of teachers so that they could be armed in schools, made a gameshow out of wanted criminals, and openly encourages law-abiding citizens to be prepared to return fire against criminals. This is a place where people fly the US flag from a personal flag pole in their lawn, or sometimes a confederate flag, and where the US flag gets displayed at work. This is a place where public transportation is a joke, with buses labeled "SCAT" (really!) that make a trip of a few miles take hours, and nobody is bothered by that. Until a few years ago, huge pickup trucks rolling coal were a more common sight than electric cars. This is a place where you can shoot a real AR-15 in your backyard if you have enough acres, and people do. This is a place with hurricanes and termites instead of earthquakes, so houses are usually concrete block.