Oh yea, I agree the natural beauty is astounding. It's the extreme left wing, near Bolshevik culture and attitude that has destroyed it for me. I say this as a lifelong democrat.
There is a vast difference between American liberals and left-wing politics.
They aren't the same (thank god - the original Bolsheviks were psychotics!) but plenty of resemblences. There is still the absurd supply-and-demand denialism common to both the area and the self-proclaimed left-wing. Then there is the whole "fight new higher density housing as gentrification" making everyone worse off as the supply doesn't rise but rents do anyway.
Extreme-left wingers in my view stand head to head with extreme-right wingers. These people are the cancer of the society IMO.
There aren't any Maoist (or any of the other descendants of Leninism) governing parties in the Bay Area, either.
There are right wings in Europe that carry very strong albeit slightly different conservative beliefs.
In any society, there will be conservative views and liberal ones. It just seems like there is a difference in how those beliefs are exercised. Extremism in one side just brings extremism to the other side.
"Extreme" left used to be about worker rights, universal health care, sheltering the poor, or reducing global strife (say the anti-war movements of the 60s/70s).
Bay Area left is now about grievance politics, defunding the police, being anti-tech (represented as being anti-gentrification, or anti-billionaire, but the deeper issue is usually anti-tech, which is seen as what made living in SF/Oakland unaffordable, as opposed to say, obstructionism), etc. It's gotten a lot more extreme in recent years, and I hesitate to even call it "left" because it's more like they've branch off along a new dimension on the axis. You get some of that in Europe too, but it's nowhere near as radicalized.
It's less that the extremes are on two opposite ends, but just two flavors of the right of the economic ideology spectrum who share a goal of not wanting to be taxed and don't wish to fund/provide public services.