No. It would not be possible for a significant number of people to, for example, stop working in London and start working in Basingstoke. The jobs simply do not exist! It might be possible for a small number, but not for everyone.
So the UK economy relies on people undertaking long distance commuting. We should change that, but punishing people for doing it is cruel.
We're maybe talking slightly cross purposes. Commuting from the South East (former NSE area minus some of the western extremes[1]) is a fairly long way but isn't really what I was thinking of, with season tickets costing typically around £4-5K PA that's vaguely similar money to the likes of the BahnCard 100 and Generalabonnement (a bit more expensive, but not ridiculously so). Similarly, the likes of the western Peak District to Manchester isn't what I'm aiming at - I'm thinking more like people going over Woodhead from the Liverpool direction, of which there are quite a few.
There are people commuting far longer distances than that (e.g. Bristol-London, Birmingham-London, Brighton-London, Liverpool-Sheffield and the likes) and it's that that is
really unsustainable. I would suggest commuting by car with a drive of over 1hr needs seriously deprecating, far more so than even 2 hours by train, because of the effects of fatigue on road safety. I did it for a bit (about 1h45 door to door), it was grim and downright dangerous - I switched to 2.5 hours by train as this was far less hard on me and didn't pose a risk to other road users.
If you watch some property TV programmes it seems not uncommon for people to choose to buy houses in the western Cotswolds and one person commute to London and the other to Bristol/Birmingham. This too is pretty unsustainable - really, choose one and move closer.
My point isn't about suggesting people should all get jobs in small commuter towns, as as you say these don't exist.
[1] With much of the employment being around the City of London area, that doesn't translate nicely to simple rail journey times. MKC-EUS is half an hour but it'll likely take you another 45 minutes on top to get to the office packed onto the insufferably grim Northern Line, whereas it might be an hour from Basingstoke to Waterloo but then you can walk to the office in 20 minutes.