The "other things" aren't what they once were either - I'd take my US private health care over the current state of the UK's NHS any day of the week right now. The wait times for even basic treatments are insane, and thats before we consider the wider state of the UK economy and public services.
> you will have your skilled visa in about 2 weeks depending on the country.
You can't really generalize like this in my experience - there are so many individual factors - just where you were born is going to affect how long your visa takes in many countries. The systems also vary enormously, from opaque hard to navigate like UK/US to open points based like Canada or Australia etc. It takes far longer than two weeks just waiting for an H1B decision result too in most cases.
let's not start on the nightmare called h1b.
yeah current cost of living in the uk, is kinda fucked but us isn't faring better. if you only look at raw salary number then yeah US is ahead, but once you start factoring other things - uk / us are on par.