It also helped that the characters were living in Massachusetts, a state with one of the highest minimum wages in the country, in a small city not in a major metro with a declining population and their apartments were decent but a long ways from posh. The characters were unreasonably comfy, but it was mostly in ways that could be elided. For example, no one ever experienced a nasty dental issue that required a $1,000+ out of pocket expense dropped into their uninsured mouth, but fictional characters can safely just live in a world were dentistry never happens.
There are so many ways this arc could have been done better. The central elements are that rich AIs establish a wacky research institute but it's a mess and when Claire unexpectedly gets a job offer there she ends up realizing that in order to advance her career she's going to have to wade through some deep dysfunction.If we had this exact same arc but it was Claire interviewing for a small library I would have much fewer complaints. I wouldn't even care if the library was in Northampton - it's unrealistic that there would be a head librarian job available in the smallish town at the exact moment Claire graduates, but it's easy enough to handwave that away in service of the plot. Instead we got...this.
The wacky research institute part is fine. Super rich AIs already exist in the comic. Having one of them establish a wacky research institute on something the scale of a building is nothing. Real life super-rich people do that all the time. Cubetown is simply too big. Even having such a research institute hire Claire is fine, if it had been explained as a bit of unconscious networking. Claire, after all, is no more than a single degree of separation from two AI superintelligences, Station and Yay, along multiple pathways. Either one could easily nudge her application across a metaphorical desk an the appropriate moment. And, really, having a rich friend-of-a-friend or friend-of-a-parent quietly arrange to get you a job is simply bog-standard. Instead the Director is simply too weird for that very functional explanation to hold.