Maybe not cash-strapped. In my experience (I worked for local government for several years), road funding is always at the bottom of the political campaign list because it's one of those problems that is very easy to just kick down the road (no pun intended). In my jurisdiction, we wasted hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars repaving the roads every 3 years or so with the cheap stuff instead of tearing up the road entirely and rebuilding it properly to last 20 years for only double the price of the 3 year repavement. So I see this from the perspective of allowing lazy politics to continue in these towns.

OP's comment is indicative of the exact demographic that is being targeted with this ad.

Not only does the comment depict a complete lack of understanding of infrastructure in the US and the upkeep challenges, but it helps to magnify Domino's marketing by providing an effectively useless contribution to the discussion.

No, they are fear mongering ("horrifying") because one is able to find cities that will accept handouts. Never mind the fact that these cities have no reputation to lose for accepting handouts. What is horrifying about this?

The roads were shitty when I was a kid and they’re shitty now. No big apparent change to me.

Anecdotes are not data