I have family still stuck in Small Town, Texas. I say stuck, but they don't see it that way. They see it as home and I can't seem to get them to leave. Small towns have horrible internet, a lot of them are food deserts, housing is old and falling apart, they are at least 30 minutes to an hour from even basic chain restaurants, etc., etc. Being in a small town is really disconnecting for most people, especially people 40+ years old who don't use the internet for more than email and their Facebook echo chamber. They've been in small towns for so long and the cities have changed so much, even in the last 5 - 10 years, that merely visiting a city for a day rattles them pretty hard. They're already on edge because they keep hearing all the hyperbole about the "warzone," then they show up and have to deal with the traffic, construction, large numbers of people, and they go haywire. When my dad comes to visit his grandkids, I have to let him vent for almost an hour about how awful driving in was, how many people there were at Buccee's, and how he must have practically almost died getting here before he actually remembers why he is here in the first place.
So the kids who grow up in small towns now go off to college and never come back because they've been away long enough for the nostalgia of home to wear off and the town's warts start to show through. They spend four or more years having the entire world and everything they need at their fingertips and have absolutely zero desire to return to Pearsall or Muleshoe or Ben Bolt or Nixon. The only outlier I can think of is Texas A&M. I know a good number of people who went to A&M and then went running back to their small town, whether it be to teach, work the family farming business, or take what little jobs there are in banking and county-wide IT work. I think most of us on this board can parse why that is.