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I moved from top tier PE to a tier 1 VC platform and while it's much more pleasurable day to day there are plenty of issues with it too. 

I would say to your points:

1. The most exciting companies, constantly looking at deals that are genuinely cool. Contrast to the boring, sleepy services roll-ups or the dusty old accounting firms that you look at in PE, which no sane person would actually find interesting.

Correct enough not worth talking about

2. Great hours and WLB while not sacrificing too much on pay relative to PE. Very low chance of burnout that feels all too common on my side of the pond.

Probably true on average but the killers in VC are grinders just the same as PE, it just so happens to career attracts a lot of lazy/unserious people

3. Consistent “investability” regardless of market. In the early 2010s it was SaaS, today it’s AI, tomorrow it’ll be something else. But at the end of the day there will always be something to invest in because there will always be a new trend. The “PE is dead” sentiment can’t ever be applied to VC because entrepreneurship will never die. And VC firms can just adapt to what founders are focused on at any given point.

Not true, there are like 15 good deals, the scarcity is insane; I would reorient thinking here. Very hard to be a contrarian Thielian thinker, would assume you're more of a down the fairway VC in which case it's competitive to brand and your own network even more so (why would you want to invest in someone who wants to take your money, you personally, not just your brand - a bit of a Yogi Berra-ism of I don't want to be part of any club that'll have me as a member). Modern firms are set to find these deals as quickly as possible and monetize them throughout their entire lifecycle, whether that be instruments for credit, growth, cohort financing, etc. The name of the game is there is a huge scarcity of assets and when you find one you have to ride that bucking bronco as long as you possibly can. I would deeply encourage you to think about this more because this is the place where you are fully dead wrong in your thinking (or at the very least don't appreciate as much as you should, which why should you you're in PE, but you really really ought to spend time thinking about this for yourself).

4. Low churn, don’t always need to keep your head on a swivel.

You'd be surprised but don't see this as a major point really because if you aren't seen as essential to the above (monetizing the important dealflow) then your career won't go anywhere and nobody wants to hire a failed VC. 

To take a separate tack that's more tactical, I would think of places like Index and Redpoint as apprenticeship places with low churn and places like GC and a16z as effectively pod shops with high churn to make this a useful parallel. 

5. Effectively get paid to build your network every day with the sourcing aspect of the job.

Sure? But you should think about what that means and how you will do it. That's actually a pretty hard question to answer. It seems great on the outside but it's still a hard problem. Why does so-and-so get the first call from Dario when he wants to go raise a 5 handle for Anthropic? Why does Neil Mehta get the allocation for SSI? What gives the Theil/FF camp right to win the Anduril/Saronic etc. types? If you go to any given place, how will you actually advance their strategy in a way that they themselves are not able to do? I wouldn't think of VC as a show up and do it job, at the post-PE age you need to have some idea of what you're going to do differently and how you're going to compete. The post-PE ladder climb guys get blown out because they're just paper pushers and while there are seats where you can hide behind brand indefinitely in VC, I can guarantee you those are just kind of middling careers and aren't as hunky dory as they seem on the outside. 

And from the other poster:

1. You don’t have to be in SF but the bay is still very much the America’s center of innovation and tech entrepreneurship, and it’s simply much harder to network as much when you’re not in the Bay. With that being said, as someone who made the move from NY to SF, I feel like SF genuinely isn’t that bad. For anyone who enjoys the outdoors, SF is leaps and bounds better than NY for that lifestyle

You definitely need to be in SF. The exceptions to the rule are certain NYC shops (Index, Redpoint Growth, Thrive, Coatue, USV, a handful of other seed funds). But as a truism you need to be in SF, there is a huge information divide between SF and NYC. Living here has the tradeoffs you expect but do you want to have a career adjacent to tech innovation or not. If yes, go to SF. If not, don't bother. Why do the paltry version of the thing. 

And to your last question:

Am I missing anything, or is this really just the ideal seat in finance?

You are missing a ton. You are missing whether you want to be In The Flow, and I am of the opinion that the only way for a generic post-PE deal guy to survive is to be In The Flow, because I don't think the PE-turned-Venture-Capitalist has an inherent right to win, in the short term, Outside The Flow. From Will Manidis:

The essential question for the modern allocator, the deal guy, or the venture capitalist is: Do You Want to Be In The Flow?

Size of check, size of fund, personal economics, character of deal, character of behavior, lifestyle, and every other single question is downstream of whether you are in The Flow or not.

Let me explain.

Think of The Flow as the world’s greatest nightclub. It’s open 24/7. Many of the coolest and richest guys are there. Guys seem to get rich just by dint of hanging around. And the lights never turn on. It’s a party that never ends.

Inside The Flow, the only decision you have to make is to keep partying.

Sure, people get hurt inside The Flow. Sometimes guys buy tables they can’t afford or get addicted to habits they can’t maintain. When this happens, The Flow gently returns them to pedestrian life and the party continues. No one even seems to notice.

When you are inside The Flow, the only thing you notice is the guys at higher rungs dangling over a seemingly endless set of 10x markups and lifestyle expenses to exhaust your newly found carry.

Inside The Flow, we don’t fly commercial, Marc Rowan is constantly calling, and we have houses on Gin Lane. The Flow gives to those who give to it.

There is nothing wrong with being in The Flow. Many great investors live their lives entirely inside of it and have beautiful economics, families, and even return capital to incredible endowments inside The Flow.

But very few people make the conscious decision to realize that life is possible outside The Flow. That you can get rich, build great companies, generate excess returns by being far, far, far outside The Flow.

But you can’t only have one foot in. If you’re going to enter The Flow, you must do it entirely: no one gets rich hunting for value on Madison Avenue. If you’re in the business of buying marquee assets, you need to systemically order your life around paying marquee prices.

Across asset classes, you can neatly order firms into “In The Flow” and “Out of The Flow.” Firms “In The Flow” tend to have softer J-curves because they are able to quickly make deals consensus and achieve markups through other friends at the party.

Firms outside The Flow tend to be a bit slower, have much more profound J-curves, but can achieve incredible returns if they persevere.

Many of the social oddities of allocators are actually social oddities of being In The Flow. My friend Kyle Tucker names the main one below—going guy for guy at every social occasion. (”I can’t believe what was said at the Apollo AGM in Lake Como.” “Ari Emanuel introduced me to the Pope.” “I just bought Ramp forwards at 500x from Bill Ackman’s dog walker.”)

If you find yourself with a strong distaste for this lifestyle, that’s OK. There’s a rich life possible outside of The Flow.

But you need to make the conscious decision—day in, and day out—to either be in The Flow, or Far Outside.

The Flow only gives to those who give their all to it.

If you want to be In The Flow, VC is perfect. But Being In The Flow as a state is just as consuming as a PE lifestyle. That's what people don't get. You have to give yourself to it. Especially in SF. You have to have quasi-friends-cum-associates, you have to be gossiping with other VC bros on bachelor parties, you have to spend every weekend at founders' parties downtown (they all suck so much), you have to throw a dinner at NeurIPS, you have to be quasi-public-life, or, at least, a combination of these that takes all of your free thought and converts it into giving The Flow what you have to give.