But, also in theory, cost of living drives competitive salary, which in turn drives whether a company can afford to hire employees in a particular city.

So if you build more housing, cost of living goes down, which attracts more companies to the city who were priced out of the labor pool before, which increases jobs in the city, which attracts people and increases housing usage...

The part of this logical chain that I don’t follow is the low cost of living attracting companies.

I can see why low cost of living ought to attract companies but in practice the new companies seem to gravitate towards already high cost of living cities.

This may be because the other considerations (workers, education, infrastructure etc) May outweigh low cost of living alone. Or there might be another reason I cannot think of.