I actually lived through the last time people said this, in the late 1980's to mid-1990's.

I took a sabbatical from work specifically to work in one of these "tech communes" that were springing up in unlikely places like AZ, MT, NM, etc.

The idea was that coders could be anywhere, so why not go somewhere cheap, beautiful, and have a really nice life outside of work, as well?

Didn't work out. Turns out face-time is a real thing, and that when you work outside of the city, you are not pressured by the same stresses that city-dwellers are... so you don't think of inventing Uber, because, well, shit. The store is right down there, and I walk over there when I need something. Or I borrow Bob's truck when I need some hay. Or whatever.

I wound up moving to Eastern Europe just after the wall came down, and lived a Wild-West kind of existence over there for the better part of a decade. And their tech infrastructure was always better than the US, and remains so even today. But Silicon Valley is still the 800 lb gorilla, no matter how many other countries try to develop their own version of it.

Turns out, the people who make the disposable income are the people in the cities. And unless you live there with them, you don't come up with the killer apps that they will pay for. (No matter what that "app" is...)