Native Appalachinoid here. Live in WV my entire life. Even worked in the coal industry for a couple years.
I love my state but I could never recommend anyone try to live here.
There's basically nothing.
I've lived in our largest cities and they're blips on the map compared to those of other states. Charleston, and ESPECIALLY Huntington are rundown as fuck. Huntington has good reason for being the city with the highest usage of opioids in the USA. Morgantown's pretty nice though.
I hate our economic desolation but I love our culture. West Virginians are by far the nicest people you'll ever meet in the USA, especially in the small towns.
This isn't exactly true for the mountain folk that live in the hollows off the main interstates. They can be pretty isolationist and weird. t. my mother's half of my family are mountain people, and they're about as stereotypically backwards as you can think.
We have little oddities about ourselves that most out-of-staters don't know. Pepperoni rolls are considered a staple here. Many families, including my own, have their own familial recipe for them. They're a holdover from the mining days due to a large presence of italian immigrants.
There's a very tiny town in the center of the state called Helvetia that was made by German and Swiss immigrants, and their descendants have done their best to keep the town as ethnically pure and culturally preserved as possible. I visited once, its a warm community.
I hate the way YouTubers do parachute journalism on my state. Obsession with abandoned mining equipment is incredibly high. They treat it like its some sort of creepypasta shit, it's really fucking gay.