Seattle is as expensive as NYC except everything closes at 9 and it has 1/100th vibrancy. It's basically San Jose North.
Sure the 'average' apartment in NY might be similar to the average apartment in Seattle, but does the latter have a full kitchen in a safer neighborhood while the former is a half kitchen in a rough neighborhood?
Is the average home price both 2M but one of them gets you a 4 bedroom house and the other gets a 2 bedroom condo?
Not to say that there isn't better reasons to live in NYC, but 'CoL' is hard to meaningfully capture by service level stats.
Seattle has unusually good building codes (single-stair is allowed) but no income tax, so in that way it might not benefit from tech as much.
Just a decade ago Fremont was a kind of cultural retirement community for the professional class in their 30s and 40s with an older generation of artists and small business owners. But now it's a retirement community for a lot of people in their 40s and 50s with school-age kids, and that older generation are either dead, retired, or priced out.
It's about an hour walk to Capitol Hill from Fremont and the walk around Lake Union is pleasant most of the year, but not so much in the winter. Driving to Ballard is probably your best option for nightlife around now, which I admit is pretty hit or miss.
So yeah, your perspective makes sense to me. Seattle has "at least one" year round nightlife neighborhood, but you're right that it's nothing like NY or Berlin where you have both full transit coverage and multiple districts to choose from.
But you nailed in on the head -- you have to find ethnic food made by people who know how it's supposed to taste and making it for people who know how it's supposed to taste. If I go into an ethnic restaurant I know it's good if the majority of the customers are that ethnicity.
SF Japantown feels old and rundown like nobody's moving there anymore.