If you are starting as an average,non FAANG engineer in an expensive city it probably sucks a bit more.
It's kind of distressing to hear someone express "Just Uber everywhere" as the ideal template for a car-free lifestyle, with walkability and public transportation relegated to "bonus points." I live car-free in the metro area outside of D.C. and primarily get around by bus and bicycle. I suspect that it requires a much lower budget than Ubering everywhere and you can live a lot more healthily by doing so too.
edit: I'd also like to point out that when you impose such a high price tag on all of your spatial displacements, you discourage yourself from doing it more. With walking, cycling and public transit, you open yourself up to a lot more serendipitous and impulsive trips. Today I cycled a few minutes to the park and did some work on a picnic table because I just felt like I wanted a change of scenery. Then I came back an hour later. Doing that with Uber would have felt absurd.
Extensive subway system has always been one of the main differences of how enjoyable city life actually is in the various cities I've lived in. Thinking about a car as just a time saving activity versus a necessity (even if it's a ride share) is extremely freeing.
If that is your metric, then there isn't a single big city in the US aside from NYC (and, maaaaybe, Chicago).
With all other big cities in the US, you can technically get away by using public transport exclusively, but with a really giant caveat - your place of living, your place of work, and all the other places you would want to visit are all, by sheer luck, located near public transport routes. There is a non-zero number of people in this situation, but it requires a great deal of luck and specific choices to be made for that to happen.
To be more specific, I will use Seattle as an example. We have a solid lightrail and bus system, and the expansion of lightrail has been going great. Public transport covers a lot of places and areas one might need or want to go to. But it doesn't cover an even larger amount of places/areas. I personally know plenty of people here who live without cars, and even the most pro-public-transport of them resort to Uber/Lyft fairly often. Not as a time-saving activity, but out of necessity.
So you need a car, just paying for one as a service instead of direct ownership.
Umm ... Those all require a car, it just might not be _your_ car. It doesn't help make cities accessible and walkable.