I think you make a lot of good points here, but I think a little more weight needs to be placed on the "big paychecks" part. When my wife and I bought a house here (in SF) a couple of years ago, we had to make offers on nearly 20 homes over the course of 18 months before we had an offer accepted, and we were coming in with an all cash offer at or above asking price every time. The problem we ran into was that there were usually ~7 offers ahead of us (also all cash obviously, but even higher over asking). The income disparity is so extreme these days, and I hesitate to say "income" because these are not senior engineers at FAANG that we were bidding against, these were people who likely earn 10s of millions a year and/or come from extreme family wealth. The wealth gap really is staggering.