I would suggest, though, that if you didn't grow up in the bay area and have family property here, as a relocation target it should be considered similar to gold mining. You're moving here for work because of the amount you can save [as a result of ludicrous tech compensation] and then use elsewhere, not because it makes sense financially to actually be living here.
I'm third generation here. Although I'm remote, my wife's job is tied to a location here. We both want to live someplace with a strong international community, access to an airport with lots of overseas flights, and that is a reasonably large population center. (IMHO Seattle is still small, and we are lacking many things for it, although that has gotten better over the last decade or so.)
The only other locations that meet our criteria have either garbage politics or garbage weather. (not that I'm happy with Seattle's politics, but at least our city council is mostly incompetent and a little bit malicious, as opposed to mostly malicious and a little bit incompetent!)
Best of luck to you on your endeavor.
I don't want a super low CoL, but I realize that housing prices have gone up in excess of what they should have due to restrictive housing policies.
Seattle used to be 1/2 the price of the Bay Area, or less! Engineers here earned less than in the SF, but we were OK with it because the QoL was great at a much lower cost.
But the city and surrounding areas refused to upzone, to such a degree that the state legislature finally had to force the issue, but even then the laws passed are too little too late.
The reason for the high CoL is lack of construction, plain and simple. Getting simple residential permits can take half a year or more, environmental regulations have limited what even homeowners can do with their own houses, and the majority of the city is still zoned for only single family homes.
The high price of building means that daycares can't open (too expensive to justify), and workers in all fields demand ever higher pay just so they can afford rent, which drives up the cost of everything.
For the last decade we've built 1/2 as many houses as we've had people moving to the city, and a large percent of new dense construction is rental only, which means money leaving the city and residents not building up any equity (or long term stake) in the city.
Bad policies lead to bad outcomes.
Per the US government's own BLS, the median household has >$1,000 leftover each month after all ordinary expenses. Americans may not save much but it isn't for lack of available income.
America is full of people who are working a job and a half (with a good chance both are 30hr a week jobs that offer no benefits, and may have "flexible" scheduling where the employee is called in to work different computed selected shifts each week), and people who are working in offices earning good money.
In the middle you have some people working trades still.
We switched over from a manufacturing economy that made things and gave people stability and enough money to raise a family to a "service" economy, and then we started telling everyone working service jobs that "those jobs aren't real careers, so of course you are being treated and paid poorly!"
The city just dismantled its gifted program for schools, so if your kid is a high achiever plan on another 40k a year for schooling.
Even swim classes have a huge waitlist and are expensive. Any type of children's activity is absurdly expensive due to the high cost of living.
Housing is absurd, if you have a couple kids plan on spending 4k a month on rent for a place in a nice neighborhood.
Most Americans have around a thousand dollars in savings and that is it. Americans are, by and large, not even able to save up for retirement, with zero hope of leaving anything to their kids.
Tech worker salaries are a small bubble in all of this.