The corporations do not hold all the cards in all situations.

Take Austin at the moment, the "It" city that all the Cool Kids are flocking to, the darling of the business press for growth stories. Its population growth rate is faster than many cities much larger than it, by both absolute numbers and percentage growth. It is continuously growing a deeper pool of skilled knowledge worker talent; not nearly enough to rival giants like SV in tech, NYC in finance, BOS in bio, or Shenzen in hardware mfg., but enough to put it firmly on the heat map of "lots of eligible, skilled workers". Compared to those category-leading cities, the cost of housing in equivalent neighborhoods is cheap (though make no mistake, already out of reach of middle class households). There should be no tax concessions from a city in such a hyper-growth situation.

The messaging that "taxpayers have to give corporations a break for the jobs else the corporations take their ball and go elsewhere with the jobs" is a canard. These tax break arrangements last 5+ years, sometimes decades, sometimes effectively in perpetuity with constant re-negotiations the norm as agreements come up to expiration. There is often no, little, or lax monitoring of benefits received for the consideration. I haven't heard of big municipalities negotiating performance bonds, nor breakup fees. Some deals won't even "break even" until long after an agreement expires, so they need an investment horizon where the corporation stays after an expiration for anything to pencil out. Typical financial traders call parties negotiating these kind of terms "chumps" and "muppets" on days they're feeling charitable; NSFW pejoratives are used more often.

Many of these tax break arrangements are thin facades over what are effectively irrationally-expensive political bribes footed by taxpayers for sitting politicians to claim PR points in the political arena, especially for re-election fodder, frequently negotiated under conditions and terms that are effectively between private parties, and in representative systems frequently with little direct access by citizens to vote up or down. On the corporation side of the table, they pay a professional negotiator and get a return in the orders of magnitudes range that drops straight to the bottom line, Other People's Money else pays for the deal, in the vast majority of cases they can lay off and outsource/offshore the ostensible jobs that the jurisdiction was going to benefit from without penalty, or even close up and move away to a better offer before the arrangement is even expired and the jurisdiction even breaks even. It's free money for the corporations, and if taxpayers are foolish enough to sign off (by not voting out or better yet insta-recalling politicians who arrange these deals) on this, the taxpayers only have themselves to blame. Shareholders in the corporations should be upset that these deals suck up finite executive team time; no matter how much is sent to the bottom line, it's a one-shot that doesn't represent the highest and best use of that time, while the same execs spending the time putting in place revenue generators that grow the top line is far more valuable.

There are many (I'd go as far as to say most, and in many specific instances, all) on the corporation side of the negotiating table who do have good intentions and believe the ostensible messaging, but the financial returns history of these deals is so bad that in an open market the deals would have long since been punished with appropriate interest rates for the high risks they bring to the buyers (the taxpayers). I'd say the same about the politicians, as I think most of these deals are a case of a tragic mix of wishful thinking, inexperience with evaluating complex economic policy, cognitive biases, and go-fever combining into a perfect storm to create poor deals.

TL;DR: human nature, yo.