Thanks for the well thought out reply, I'm gonna touch on a couple of your points:

I can understand this, however, these days you can make very real and career "advancing" connections anywhere(even online 😱)

That's often not true. Most jobs in my industry specify the maximum distance you can live from the office, and there isn't an official rule hiring managers would still usually hire the guy with an address in the same location instead of having to wait for them to relocate and all that. It might be unique to public jobs, but in my world hiring candidates from a different location requires you to foot the bill to relocate them, something that usually isn't possible unless they're some specialist.

Also anecdotally, when I lived with my parents in a small town ~7 years ago I didn't get any bites applying for jobs in cities.

If you don't have a career plan in mind, what are you doing in the city? If you know what you want to do, find a job in that field which can "fatten up" your CV.

My only career plan was "intellectually simulating office work", I got there eventually, but it involved scraping by in the city working odd jobs for about 3 years, plus an 8 month graduate certificate program.

I lived with roommates, and got really good at cooking with dry beans and grains, and has a modest amount of support from my family, but I eventually found a job I love.

And I got the interview through a connection I made at a in-person meetup group.

I know how hard it was for me ~5 years ago and I had some help from my family.

Rents are higher now, not sure I could do it with today's prices, definitely not without a bit of help from the bank of mom and dad. People who don't have that are screwed unless they get very lucky and find a good job right out of school.