Cumberland, MD vs San Francisco. Wow, when I overlay urban areas of Bay Area, it's heavily built up in much flatter areas and gets much less dense as elevation change gets steeper. Not to mention, sea access gives you massive advantage since you are not having to move as much over really tall mountains.

Cumberland, MD has none of these. It's in a valley between two larger ridges of mountains but is heavily constrained. Also, not having sea access means transporting goods there is much more difficult and requires more infrastructure. And since we are one nation, you could just move west to much flatter Ohio and Great Lakes or East to flat parts of Maryland and Chesapeake Bay.

Sure, Bay area built up with creating really excellent schools that created really high paying industries but thinking it was "We lifted ourselves up by our bootstraps" and instead "Our geography and World War with Navy on our coast desperate to win really did help us."

The Bay Area really benefits from Stanford and Berkeley being there. You need a steady stream of educated new grads to grow from.