Also, my own take is that the high rent in NYC is sort of proof that the quality of life is high. Or at least, NYC is desirable. People are willing to pay a premium to live there, which is a strong signal of their preference.
On one hand this is still preference. They pick to be in a city over the other options available. On the other hand the other options aren't available because enough people are already interested in centralizing life choice options into a city and so it just drives that feedback loop over and over as more people choose where the option of the day is rather than what they'd like. The only thing holding this loop back from runaway is large cities eventually seem to have population growth fall behind cost of living growth and that stops the runaway for the particular city.
Perhaps more simply: the immediate and big picture preference often don't align and this misalignment further drives a larger gap in those two preferences over time until the cost to scale the city finally becomes too high.
What's the benefit to the corporation to do that? They move to a more affordable area, which corresponds to less concentrated, which corresponds to fewer workforce available, especially if the goal is to spend 10 minutes commuting, as you state.
That said, I do agree that some amount of distribution of infrastructure spending makes a lot of sense. But even if you did that, New York itself could raise enough taxes to make its own infrastructure without having to tax the rest of the nation.
But I would say the US has done this reasonably well, NY is nowhere as dominatie any many other places. You have Boston with universities and medical, Valley, LA areospace/media, DC government and so on and so on.
But economics is pretty clear, hubs are good, getting a place with lots of experts togheter improves efficency for everybody. And getting enough people together that proper infrastructure pays for itself is also good.