That is somewhat true. The main issue is getting out of/into the city center. For example, getting to the big tech park of tel aviv (Ramat HaHayal) can take over an hour with a bus. So people take cars, but then there's so much traffic and lack of parking, it also takes an hour. Not much for someone who lives in the US but you can essentially drive half of Israel in an hour.

It also makes visiting family , which is a big thing in Israeli culture and enabled by short distances, very annoying if you don't have a car.

Scooters and e-bikes "solved" a lot of these troubles inside the city, but infrastructure hadn't caught up - not enough bike lanes make it very dangerous and injuries and even deaths are not uncommon. The upcoming newly built intercity tram should theoretically also help.

Yes, it's walkable for your daily needs, and people normally do a lot of errands by walking as well. But not to work.

Also, the lack of bus service during Shabbat means everybody needs a car just to go see their family every Friday, which then means you're a car owner and more tempted to create traffic the rest of the week. Since 2019, Tel Aviv mayor used a loophole in the Shabbat law - by offering busses for free they are able to run during Shabbat, but the area covered is small.

Why hasn't tel-aviv made a metro yet? It's not the USA, there are many people from europe who have had a good experience with metros in their home countries, it's not poor and it's not Houston sized sprawling either.

They're working on it. Excavation is indeed a pain, there's a lot of extra traffic recently due to the construction, and people complain about the noise too. But it's happening.

I don't expect it to help much with the Shabbat issue, but politics are hard to predict so we'll see.

I would imagine that excavation in Tel Aviv would be a huge pain, and previously there were a lot of security concerns with bunching people up in a metro. Perhaps now things have quieted down but the land has gotten very expensive.

Ah there is a metro plan! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tel_Aviv_Metro