Check the unemployment laws in your state. Where I live, “performance issues” isn’t a valid termination reason for denying unemployment, although filing an appeal letter to a judge is necessary to ensure you can collect unemployment in those cases. Each state is going to have different rules though.
People who say that tend to be people who don’t ever visit Tacoma and don’t know what they’re talking about.
A counterpoint is this article that came out yesterday, listing Tacoma as the third-best place to live in the country (according to Bankrate.com): https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/tacoma/tacoma-named-best-places-live/281-53273688-2959-4ea0-ad45-46a48331084e
Every big city has crime. The Seattle metro area is safer than most.