Growing up 2 hours from your extended family is radically different from growing up in the middle of your extended family.
I grew up ~5 minutes from my grandparents, great-grandparents, and two aunts & uncles. During the summers, my grandmother would watch us when we were smaller, and sometimes my great-grandmother or aunts or uncles. We'd go over for lunch or dinner on Sundays, stop by someone's house on the way to run an errand, tag along to quilting circles and church events.
There's a casual contact you get living so close to so much family that you lose when you need to coordinate schedules and "make it worth" a 4 hour trip each way. It becomes a burden for you to bundle up the family and drive them out once or twice on the weekends, and an imposition for your family to entertain you each weekend, not to mention the loss of week-day contact.
There isn't two options, live down the street and see extended family everyday or live two hours away and see extended family only on Christmas and Thanksgiving on odd number years. There's a ton of in-between and it's totally disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
Yes, you don't get daily contact with extended family when you live two hours away (and usually not if you even live 2 minutes away) but we are talking about a case where it's at the expenses of not getting daily contact with a parent plus the marital strain that it probably causes. It's not like one is objectively worse than the other.
If your family is so nasty they basically write you off because you moved two hours away then they aren't really the kind of people you want to be close with anyways. You're basically laying out a scenario where your family only cares about you if you happen to be physically present.
Plus the people who think nothing of commuting four hours a day five days a week are not suddenly going to be extremely burdened by commuting four hours once a week.
Over a decade ago I moved 2.5 hours away from my home town but I have maintained very close relationships to the people that are there I wish to remain close with and we visit very regularly without anyone feeling burdened or imposing. It works very well if all the participants involved want it to work.
I'm not saying you can't maintain a close relationship with a little distance.
But first and foremost, there's a big difference between you yourself traveling 2 hours each way (to work) and you, your spouse, and 2.5 children traveling 2 hours each way. Getting kids ready & keeping them entertained for a 10 minute drive is bad enough.
And it's insane to say four hours of travel time isn't limiting. You maintain a close relationship, sure, see them often, sure. But do you stop by just for lunch or dinner? Do you see them during the week, or just on weekends? Do you go to the same church, are your kids in the same softball league? If the kids are sick and need someone to watch them during the day, do you drop them off with grandpa or do you take a day off work?
The point of having a 2 hour commute is so that you can live where you want to spend most of your time. If you want to spend most of your time 15 minutes from your office, great. If you have somewhere else you'd rather spend most of your time, it makes sense to live there, so that by default, there you are.
