Part of the issue is those smaller cities don’t offer a large supply of job opportunities. So people are often not able to pick and choose their location.

Plenty of cities outside the top 100 have massive amounts of jobs. And the person I replied to specifically stated willing to vary location as an option.

This is an underappreciated argument for basic income/UBI: you need a lot less of it since its very existence enables recipients to move to lower cost of living locations.

(Which in turn opens up opportunities for others to move in to the higher-cost places and boost their own productivity.)