I'll chime in and say just south of Los Angeles is Orange County that in a lot of ways a better place to live if you're in teech and also not going to be in the Bay or Seattle.
There are fewer tech jobs than LA, but most of the FAANGs have offices here. There are a lot more options for housing than LA, and a lot less traffic.
For instance, my ~5 bedroom house is worth around 2 million in a nice neighborhood and i'm a 10 minute drive from a huge Amazon office, a 10 minute drive from Blizzard HQ, and a 25 minute drive from a decent size Google office.
A similarly priced and sized house in Los Angeles would be a 80 minute commute to either Amazon, Google or Meta in Santa Monica.