Possibly unpopular opinion: there was always plenty of room for individuals to have a fulfilling tech career outside of the Bay Area, and those opportunities have if anything grown in recent years. Bay Area folks always talk like all the opportunities are concentrated there but that's never really been true and will just be less and less true as VC money dries up.
I'm sure some of it depends on what you're trying to accomplish in life, but since you didn't specify I'll answer for myself (someone who just wants to do work I enjoy for a really solid upper-middle-class paycheck and retire early)—no, you don't need to be in the Bay Area.
EDIT: To give some concrete numbers, San Jose and San Francisco represented ~180k of the nation's ~1650k software developers in 2023 [0]. That's ~10% of all US-based software developers and ~0.6% of all software developers in the world [1].
I'm sure some of it depends on what you're trying to accomplish in life, but since you didn't specify I'll answer for myself (someone who just wants to do work I enjoy for a really solid upper-middle-class paycheck and retire early)—no, you don't need to be in the Bay Area.
EDIT: To give some concrete numbers, San Jose and San Francisco represented ~180k of the nation's ~1650k software developers in 2023 [0]. That's ~10% of all US-based software developers and ~0.6% of all software developers in the world [1].
[0] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-many-software-developers-...