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The chorus almost always goes:

Silicon Valley in particular has been known for boring suburbs (with the rare except being SF with its $5000 rents), massive wealth disparities, and general lack of livability and inability to get around easily.

These are well documented issues of living in the bay. What's with the surprise? Do people not do research before uprooting?

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The trope that SF is more expensive than the rest of the Bay Area isn’t even true, at least not anymore. I pay $1650 for a studio apartment in a decent neighborhood near a tech shuttle stop. That’s cheaper than Stanford’s student housing in Palo Alto.

Palo Alto is certainly that way as of late

And Atherton, and Mountain View, and Cupertino, and Los Altos, … ;)

The rest of the bay is catching up indeed

It's not "catching up," it was built for and by business elites. For example, Los Altos Hills incorporated specifically to avoid raising taxes or building any kind of civic infrastructure. Saratoga has dispensed with its police department. None of these places are even remotely affordable (or reachable without a car), and they have never been.

Atherton is almost defined as a community for the ultra-rich, what with its prohibition on multi-family housing and enforcement of a minimal ratio of house floor area to lot size.

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