I am, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that 125 miles as the crow flies is “less than 2 hours of driving” between like 6 specific pairs of destinations in the whole world.
People tend to have friends and family they want to visit regularly. So they try plan their life around not moving too far from where they grew up. That means people won't even look at a move of 125 miles away if there is not good transportation back. In turn if the high speed route between the two destinations they won't move there and in turn won't be making those trips.
Note that I said route above, not highways. Trains, boats, airplanes, cars, or anything else you can imagine works. The method of travel doesn't matter at all. What matters is how long it takes, and that you would use it for the trip.
Half an hour door to door (by whatever travel means) means you can have dinner after work with those friends once in a while. 1 hour means you can visit every weekend, but you lose those dinner mid week dinners. 2-3 hours means you visit for every minor holiday, but it isn't every weekend. At 4-6 hours every visit is an overnight. At 8+ hours this is a week long trip.
The above ranges are guidelines, not rules, they get fudged and overlapped all the time depending on various details. If the trip is 5 hours by train you might still do it as a day trip since you can plan to nap on the train. Even if you have to drive 6 hours each way: you might attend a funeral and return all in one day.
I don’t care about the rest of your post, I just want you to understand that a completely straight highway through some corn fields isn’t how the rest of the planet drives.
That is the key here. People go all over the world for vacation. However vacations are not normal life (at least not for the vast majority of people), and can be ignored.
In normal life people have a place they live, and they have people they visit. When looking for a place to live they consider the real trips they take (not cutting through corn fields), and that guides where they move to. People do refuse jobs because they have to move too far from friends/family. People who choose to move away from friends (which does often, it isn't the majority but still common) are choosing to leave behind those friends.
The correct measure of distance is not something like miles or kilometers. It's time, that is minutes or hours.
Thus your 125 mile distance if that had really good roads that could be an hour and a half trip by car. If you had high speed rail that could be under an hour. If you were a fighter pilot and had permission to use a fighter drive at max speed just minutes (that is costs and the environment is not a concern). Each of those enables something very different about the life of the people who live in those areas.
Thus, when you say it's a lot more than two hours for you to make that trip because of whatever reason, I can in turn infer that this is a major trip that people are making and in turn they're not making it very often. It is fine to make that as a vacation, but if you were to move there permanently, that means you're going to have to find all new friends. You can still go visit the old friends, but it's not something you're going to do very often.
If you just said it was an hour and a half, then if you got an offer to move that far, say a better job, it wouldn't be nearly as big a deal because you could still go visit your friends and family fairly often. It's not something you would do every day and so you would have to find some new friends, but you could also keep your old friends.
If somehow you could do that trip in half an hour, then you could just move there and it would not change anything else about the rest of your life to move. Everyone you currently know, all your friends and family, they're easily within reach of just going to visit anytime you feel like it.