Furthermore, anything you can get off Amazon is proportionally cheaper. An iPhone XS is expensive when you're making Midwest salaries, but not so much when you're on a San Francisco payroll. A car doesn't cost much more in SF than it does in Iowa, so as a percentage of your take-home salary it's actually far cheaper.
Exactly. Travel especially seems much cheaper on Bay Area salaries! I know some people who moved to India, and told me that they'd actually be "richer" once accounting for cost of living. Except they can't leave now, every trip abroad is months of salary.
The article addresses that. For many people, the compensation more than makes up for it, and often by a large margin, e.g. more than the entire salary you'd make elsewhere, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18067642.
The truth is that the author makes a ton of good points for ambitious young people like himself, which is the audience he's addressing. Commenters who are (justifiably) tethered to their lives elsewhere have a strong incentive to deny this.