Many places have plenty of talent, capital is increasingly global, and greed is a human constant. None of these are meaningfully unique to Silicon Valley these days. What traditionally has been unique is the culture, the importance of which should never be underestimated. Unfortunately for Silicon Valley, that culture now exists in many pockets outside of Silicon Valley, often brought there by former denizens of The Valley. And those people are bring a lot more wealth with them due to making loads of money.

To your point, I do think the amount of money being thrown at employees in Silicon Valley (and Seattle, and...) has been detrimental to the ability to build hardcore technology startups. The cost of building a critical mass of highly qualified employees has made doing so effectively unachievable in many domains that require such employees to have any chance of executing successfully. This has created an arguably pathological selection bias for the kinds of startups that can be funded or the kinds of founders that can plausibly start a given company.

Silicon Valley isn’t dead but as a place to build a tech company it is looking less differentiated with each passing year. Some critical future software deep tech is now developed almost entirely outside of Silicon Valley (cloud, AI, etc) even at companies headquartered in the Valley.