I think it’s probably has something to do with cities like Atlanta and Pittsburgh (possibly KS and Omaha, although I’ve never been) having distinct character and architectural style. Mesa AZ looks like a massive sprawl of suburban “superblocks” in the desert.
That must be it, GR shows up on a lot of “best cities you need to move to” lists.
The history of annexation in America is completely time dependent.
The older east coast mostly started limiting annexation in the late 19th century and shut it down by the early 20th. Philadelphia is the classic example. It stayed as the 2 square mile area of William Penn’s original plot until 1854, when it suddenly grew to take in the entire county and became 134 sq. mi. And stayed that size ever after.
By the early 20th century, cities were being seen as dangerous and full of Others, mostly immigrants. The well-to-do had already started to flee the cities for suburbs, mostly along railroad or streetcar lines. The last thing they wanted was being forced to have their taxes used for people not like them. They took control of state legislatures and passed laws that required majorities in both areas in order for an annexation to take place. That effectively shut the process down.
Most western cities developed later and got their big growth in the automobile era. They had downtowns but cars allowed for multiple nodes across a wider area. Generally speaking, newer cities are much larger and states allowed much easier annexation because it was cost effective to combine services and no groups stood to lose their identities.
There’s also a third, short-lived, trend. Post WWII, metro consolidation was considered the way to avoid the city/suburb battles of the past. Jacksonville and Indianapolis are examples, but there are a number of different models found on this page. Suburbs continued to resist consolidation in most areas, and the trend has basically stopped.
That song “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” doesn’t help:
Had I not learned otherwise some number of years ago, I’d have gone to my grave thinking the largest city in Florida was Miami (population: half a million), not Jacksonville (population: close to a million). Who the hell ever heard of “Jacksonville Vice”? But like San Francisco/San Jose, being the more famous city doesn’t necessarily make for being the bigger city.
Did you read this thread? The number of people in the city limits of Miami is smaller because Jacksonville has huge city limits. City limits only really matter for government services.
By all other measures, Miami is larger. Using MSAs, Miami is 6.2M people in 2018 and Jacksonville is 1.5M people in 2018.
I’m pretty sick and pretty sleep deprived…this sentence almost destroyed my entire understanding of history. 
I don’t think Tutankhamun made it to San Jose, but it does house one of the bigger Egyptology museums.
I live in Austin; it’s still perceived as a mere middle-size city despite being larger, population-wise, than Seattle, Denver, Washington DC, Boston, Detroit and San Francisco.
Austin Metro area is No 30.
Seattle (16th), Denver (19tg), DC (6th or 3rd, depending on how Baltimore is counted), Boston (10th), Detroit (14th) and San Francisco (11th) are all larger.
OK, I guess the Wikipedia list was only listing the pure city limits themselves, not greater metro area.
Be careful how you interpret some of the data on that page.
Take Macon, GA for example. The population increased a whopping 68% over the past eight years. But that’s only because Macon and Bibb County consolidated in 2014.
Other relevant comments were made about that list. But I’d add it also how even ‘metro area’ isn’t a simple way to define a ‘city’, taking the 9 related to NY. The first four (which are geographically contiguous) and Cliffside park are barely separate from Manhattan right across the river and also significantly less densely populated than Manhattan. NY’s whole density comes out below that of Hoboken et al because Brooklyn and the Bronx are somewhat less dense than Hoboken et al, Queens less than half as dense and Staten Island around 1/5 as dense.
But Kaser NY (in Rockland Cty), Passaic and East Newark are only ‘part of NY’ in a much looser sense. It’s kind of a fluke that anywhere in Rockland is that densely populated, and Newark and Passaic are real though moderate size cities in their own rights with their own histories and local culture to some degree. They aren’t satellites of NY in quite the same sense as places a barely a mile from the west shore of Manhattan like like the first four. In fact also Hoboken is/was somewhat its own place and a fairly well known small city; it’s become more homogenized into NY in recent decades as it reversed long decline in population went from 75k or some in early 20th century down to 30 growing back to 55 or so now as the quasi-sixth borough.
I agree as others said, when it comes to places close in population stuff like distinct history, what sports teams the place happens to have etc tend to also matter even after you correct to ‘metro area’ which still isn’t a totally apples and apples kind of definition everywhere. Also POV. For example somebody said Seattle is recognized much more than Nashville. That’s partly a particular cultural view within the US. In the South Nashville has a long history of being a quite major place, the ‘Athens of the South’ and, obviously, in the part of US culture nationwide that pays a lot of attention to country music it’s a big deal also. Not everyone would agree that Seattle is a much more major city than Nashville.