Snow is fine, but Boston will get 3 feet of snow, then an hour of freezing rain, and the next day it will be 45F. Winter is chaos

And that situation would literally just be business as usual in somewhere like Bangor or Buffalo. In Boston it's an excuse for half the city to call out of work and the MBTA to run trains "whenever we get around to it".

In Bangor or Buffalo there is very little "business as usual". Boston is far more dense and optimized with less slack in the system.

I bet that the activity in Boston when it is "shut down" due to weather is still busier than an average day in Bangor or Buffalo.

It's probably not much of a factor any longer but, for many years after the "Blizzard of '78", everyone knew someone who had to be evacuated from Route 128 or who got stuck at work for a week. A decade or so later I remember a friend who had moved to Boston recently remarking to me that they had never seen a northern city where people were so paranoid when the first snowflake fell.

It definitely created a mindset of really wanting to get home (or just staying there in the first place) if any amount of snow was forecast. Of course, it doesn't help that traffic is pretty bad even in nominal conditions. Every few years you still end up with a 6 hour commute home situation for many people.

Both those towns are small fries compared to Boston. Why not compare it to the Arctic?

Boston in particular is full of people who think the weather is super extreme in the winter. It's mostly a cultural identity thing with a side of massholes being pansies. It's probably easier to pander to them than to tell them they're wrong.

Source: masshole who has has lived in places with harsher climates