That may be part of it but Phoenix grew by about 200k people since 2020. That’s a 4% population growth at a time when the country overall grew by about 1%. So there really are a lot of new people moving out there.
https://www.axios.com/local/phoenix/2024/03/14/population-growth-census-2020-2023
My guess? The land there has historically been cheaper than places like California (with good reason, IMHO!) and it has relatively low taxes compared to a lot of other states. Some folks are willing to put up with a lot of unpleasantness in order to save a little bit of money on taxes.
