2 hours each way sounds absolutely, life-alteringly, macro-level awful to me. It boggles my mind that someone would consider that "a little on the high end for a commute" - it might be a worthy tradeoff all things considered, and "totally do-able" in that one can do it...but personally (and I'd expect for many people), I wouldn't be happy if I was in a position where I had no choice but to be commuting for 4 hours.

Yeah you can fill that time up with podcasts or audiobooks or that sort of thing, or work for a Bay Area tech company with a work shuttle and maybe-kinda-sorta-work along the way, but you're still giving up 2-3 hours of free/unconstrained time (one might make the argument "but I would be doing the same things at home anyway" but in my mind there's a huge difference between those two situations).