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Okay, lets bring some numbers into it. I-35 through downtown has an average annual daily traffic count (AADT) of 150,000-200,000. The widest section of the Katy Freeway in Houston has an AADT of about 300,000. It seems plausible that if we doubled the width of I-35 we could get an AADT of 250,000-300,000 before experiencing the current level of congestion. That's 50,000 extra commuters (since AADT measures traffic both ways). To put that in perspective, 50,000 is 4% of the entire population of Travis County. Suppose an entire city block has to be demolished the whole length of the freeway through the county, does that directly impact 50,000 people? Do 4% of the county's citizens live or work directly adjacent to the East side of I-35? It's not like these people are thrown into the fires of Mordor either. The massively increased throughput will open up development opportunities further away from the city center, increasing the supply of housing and driving down rents.
Having your business seized is probably much worse than being able to live in a slightly further out area is good, and destroying the downtown makes it less valuable to everyone, including the new commuters, but as I tried to describe in my replies to curious, the main issue is cost. 7.5 billion is $140,000 per commuter. Another issue is just time--Austin's population increased by 200,000 between 2005 and 2015 (corresponding to each of those commuters supporting a family of 4, though in reality this is generous since families aren't that big any more). Are you going to build another 4 lanes every <10 years? Constant construction, until the whole of downtown is pavement?
The problem isn't being too far from the city, it's limitations on development. There's enormous amounts of underdeveloped land extremely close to downtown. Destroying an apartment building close to downtown so you can build more sprawling houses far away is a terrible way to reduce rents. Similarly, development opportunities far away are much less valuable. Like, this is just so backwards--let's destroy development downtown so we can build slightly more very far away? Should we just not have cities at all?
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