Hey remember when I said
> and people will try to justify it but their justification will also make zero sense

That justification you gave is the one that gets passed around and if you spend more than 5 minutes looking into it you realize it's all utter crap.
If it were true that it's because Houston "has a lot of engineers", then Huntsville should be at the very top of the pay scale, given it has more engineers per capita than any other city, but it's barely above the bottom.
You can look at this infographic that's about a decade old and yes, Houston has plenty of engineers - but what this graphic ignores is software engineers, as it only includes hardware engineers. Software engineers bring in much higher salaries than petroleum engineers at the highest levels. Part of this is skewed because software engineering isn't a "professional engineer" role, meaning most other engineering roles can be designated on whether you have a PE or are in training, whereas someone that dropped out of community college can functionally be a software engineer.
But beyond that - engineers aren't the only ones that command high paying roles, professional degrees do. This article does a phenomenal job at laying that out. Other than the energy sector, Houston is nowhere on this list. DC has the highest percentage of professional degrees, Houston isn't even top 10.
But let's look at the energy sector, which commands Houston. The DoE has one office in Houston and it employees approximately 1300 employees. On the other hand, GSFC, in Greenbelt (where I work), has over 10k employees. And that's one office. SWE is a huge growing field, and in DC alone, you have Amazon, Intel, Meta, Google, Apple just to name those off the top of my head. I have friends at Meta with similar experience to mine making 2-4x my pay, I doubt you see that in Houston.
The real answer you're looking for? Politicians. Politicians ultimately have some say in arguing for higher cost. Republicans have a tendency to threaten kneecapping programs if they don't get what they want, and Democrats have a tendency to spread their cheeks when threatened. THAT is why Houston has such a high pay area, because it was weaponized. Otherwise pay in small cities wouldn't be relatively good, whereas pay in big (blue) cities wouldn't be relatively ass.