I live in Czechia, in Europe, a first-world country with dense population and a very normal road network. I am now on vacation, and I’m exactly 205 km as the crow flies from where my parents live. If I wanted to drive to them right now, it would be a 309 km trip estimated to take 3.5 hours or, avoiding highways, a 252 km trip, over 4 hours.
I don’t care about the rest of your post, I just want you to understand that a completely straight highway through some corn fields isn’t how the rest of the planet drives.
That is the key here. People go all over the world for vacation. However vacations are not normal life (at least not for the vast majority of people), and can be ignored.
In normal life people have a place they live, and they have people they visit. When looking for a place to live they consider the real trips they take (not cutting through corn fields), and that guides where they move to. People do refuse jobs because they have to move too far from friends/family. People who choose to move away from friends (which does often, it isn't the majority but still common) are choosing to leave behind those friends.
I have no idea what point you’re trying to make or how is my vacation “the key here”. I’m visiting a regular Czech town that just happens to be almost exactly 125 miles from another regular Czech town (the one where my parents live), and I used those two particular towns as an example of how 125 miles can be a pretty big deal in Europe (or really anywhere in the world that’s not the US).
The point is this is not something you do normally because the time doesn't allow. If you could do that trip in 15 minutes you might move there since it would not change your life, but because the trip time doesn't allow you make it vacation.
Let me try again while the day has gone by. You're not the only one who doesn't understand my point.
The correct measure of distance is not something like miles or kilometers. It's time, that is minutes or hours.
Thus your 125 mile distance if that had really good roads that could be an hour and a half trip by car. If you had high speed rail that could be under an hour. If you were a fighter pilot and had permission to use a fighter drive at max speed just minutes (that is costs and the environment is not a concern). Each of those enables something very different about the life of the people who live in those areas.
Thus, when you say it's a lot more than two hours for you to make that trip because of whatever reason, I can in turn infer that this is a major trip that people are making and in turn they're not making it very often. It is fine to make that as a vacation, but if you were to move there permanently, that means you're going to have to find all new friends. You can still go visit the old friends, but it's not something you're going to do very often.
If you just said it was an hour and a half, then if you got an offer to move that far, say a better job, it wouldn't be nearly as big a deal because you could still go visit your friends and family fairly often. It's not something you would do every day and so you would have to find some new friends, but you could also keep your old friends.
If somehow you could do that trip in half an hour, then you could just move there and it would not change anything else about the rest of your life to move. Everyone you currently know, all your friends and family, they're easily within reach of just going to visit anytime you feel like it.
I don’t care about the rest of your post, I just want you to understand that a completely straight highway through some corn fields isn’t how the rest of the planet drives.