I'll add a case for Louisville, KY. Extremely low cost of living compared to the Bay Area. Not as tech-focused as you might like, but still a healthy amount of tech (especially in Healthcare and Health Insurance, which will likely remain perennial). What it lacks in tech-centrism, it gains in a balanced economy with a strong mix of every collared job. Certainly has its plaid/hippy/hipster/Alanis Morissette sides to it as well. It's an extremely foody city, operating as it does as a central hub of sorts for a number of regions of cuisine, and at times has been favorably compared to LA or NYC in terms of high ranking restaurants per capita, yet obviously at a substantial COL discount.

Kentucky could use all the help it can get to reverse its brain drain out to the coasts, and now is a great time, with so many more remote work opportunities and the overall reevaluation of COL in a time of a pandemic, to try to fix that. (It's the only way to combat nonsense like the terrible mess of what Kentucky keeps sending to the US Senate, by adding more smart people and counteracting the brain drain.)

It's not going to be on a lot of folks' radars, but Louisville, KY is a great big city that still feels like a small town in the right ways. But you don't have to take my word for it, I'm sure the chamber of commerce would love to pamphlet you to death and has better marketing copy than what I would right extemporaneously.