As the other user said, it doesn't scale. I'll give you my personal experience. I have been living in the greater Toronto area for 23 years, having moved here when I was 9. I live in one of the "cities" surrounding Toronto. This city was initially just a suburb of Toronto, that people moved to because houses were bigger and cheaper. Now it is a "city" of more than 700,000 people, in part because everyone moved here from Toronto, and in part due to high immigration in recent years. I put city in quotes because it's not really built like a city, it's still developed like a suburb with a large dependence on cars and poor public transport. All the good jobs are still in Toronto, so people still commute to Toronto for work. Before COVID and wfh, it used to take me 1.5 hours to commute to Toronto (one way), and I still had to drive to the train station. Forget driving to Toronto, it would take you just as long, if not longer, and parking costs are ridiculous. As this city grew, everyone wanted to move here for the same reason as you, bigger and cheaper houses. Now the houses are still bigger, but definitely not cheaper, and it takes forever to get anywhere. There are also less things to do because everything depends on cars.
I am writing this comment from a Italo Treno train, having been in Paris, Switzerland, Milan and Venice over the past week and half, so I have now seen the other side of this conversation.
The only freedom that cars bring is when travelling out of the city to remote places. Switzerland's inter-city rail service is so good I would never want to drive between cities if I lived there.