Depends from person to person, what you want from life, what age you're at, what career you're in, what your finances look like and what your family/relationship status is. Like if you're a radiology specialist, then you can find work in any city in the EU big or small, but if you're say an aeronautics specialist, then you're restricted to work in a handful of cities you can count on very few fingers.

One can argue that the smaller cities in EU are often times better to live in than the capitals and major economic ones, that is if you aren't dependent on the corporate/big-tech careers that are mostly dominant in the major cities which tend to suffer from high housing shortages and higher crime or at least more roughness.

But then, if you avoid the big expensive cities, you also miss out on the more developed rail transportation meaning a car might be required to save on commute times, big airports with cheap international flights, top hospitals and medical specialists, wide variety of cultural and entertainment events, etc. In the end, everything is a tradeoff, you can't have it all, all of the time. You can't have a capital city with top careers and entertainment opportunities, that pays well and is also affordable. You could get that maybe 6-14 years ago, but today not anymore.

>Maybe it doesn't matter how livable or beautiful Paris, Barcelona, Zurich, Stockholm, Sardinia, or whichever is, if you are never going to get roof over your head there.

That's also how I see it. The whole "X city is most livable" is so fucking subjective, that I just can't take those "livability" rankings I see online with a straight face, especially when I live in the country whose capital often takes the first place for "most livable city", so I know what I'm talking about.