My SIL and her husband have just come back from a multiyear work contract in LA.
All I can say is "woah." Their stories were shocking; they were counting down the days until they could get out. They hated it.
The place, according to them, is horrific. There's virtually no middle class anymore, so you just have extremely rich people and people on the poverty line. The atmosphere is horrible. LA itself is a dump, as is San Francisco, which apparently "stinks" and has to be seen to be believed -- human faeces on the pavements is a common occurrence.
The society itself is old-fashioned and very expensive the word used was "backward." Despite being the tech capital of the world, they still haven't brought in chip and pin, never mind contactless, and it costs something like $30 to send money electronically, even if it is just to your spouse. This makes it very difficult to do pretty much anything financial easily; it's like the '70s all cash and cheque.
The levels of education are dire. My BIL worked with graduates who had no idea other countries had different currencies, for example. They thought they all used the dollar. He said that it shocked him how naïve his colleagues were about so many things.
The overall impression I got was that Americans do not realise quite how bad it is themselves, largely because they have nothing to compare it to.
Though I must say that one of my relatives who was born and lives in San Diego came over before lockdown to visit us, and said he wished there was a way for him to emigrate to Britain. I thought this was odd at the time, but I'm starting to maybe understand where he was coming from. He kept talking about there being so much "community" in Britain, which may go to show how little "community" there is in LA and how that might manifest.
My SIL spoke about the racial issues over there. She's originally a South London girl who went to a multi-ethnic London school, and she said it was all just beyond weird, like some sort of sci-fi racial dystopia.
The both of them said they felt the US was heading towards some sort of reckoning, and that the situation and the general naivety of Americans probably explains some of the cultural movements coming out of the US that seem very peculiar to the rest of the West.