The article addresses this. In this part of CO, wells can cost $25k to drill without any guarantee of hitting water. It's not a panacea for these people.
I’m east of the Mississippi and my well is 200 feet deep. But this aquifer is fully allocated; all the new construction has to go to a different aquifer with a typical well depth of 700 feet. Once that is fully allocated, I think there is another one at around 1100 feet.
The price at that depth is dominated by the per foot cost. But inside the per-foot cost is the licensing, regulatory, casing compliance, and permitting compliance.
It's about $50/ft just to drill. After that is electric, the pump, the pressure tanks, burying pipe to enough houses to make each share cheap enough, and the legal cost of setting up a well share.
If you just wanted a well for your own property and merely put a spigot powered by a generator right next to it, you might be able to get away with $35k to start with. If you are looking to do a well share so that it becomes more economically feasible to split costs, I think it would be minimum $50k.
Yes, but that's covered by my second part that americans are bad at evaluating risk (many humans are I imagine, I'm just trying to be narrow in my assessment). You don't get much more "on grid" than relying on a municipal water supply.
Arguably, the issue here is that we're going to need to deal with the fact that many americans are bad at assessing personal risk. Living in the country is in fact expensive—there are fewer people to amortize costs across, especially in societies that don't have market-based housing (which is arguably why country living is considered cheaper). Water and electricity might be the easiest ways to see this, but it's stuff like "access to a hospital" that causes the most harm—a largely invisible cost until you actually need a hospital (or emergency response, or clearing roads from snow, access to postal delivery, etc etc....). At least you'll notice immediately if you don't have water.