This is a bad place for content like this, unfortunately. Hacker News is extremely hostile to car culture, suburbs, California and the US in general. I don't really drive any more due to working from home and spine injuries in my 30s that made it difficult to sit in a confined space for more than 20 minutes, and I wasn't really into modding even back in the day, but as another not Asian but also not white 80s kid from the LA suburbs, I get it. My dad's softball buddy had his own garage when I was growing up. My dad himself still works on a 1972 baby blue Ford F-150 he restored 30 years ago. There was a kid a year ahead of me in high school with a Trans Am you could hear from 2 miles away.
It's easy not to understand the nature of noise in the LA suburbs. There's a lot of loudness, but for whatever reason, maybe the lack of tall structures and steel, or the prevalence of wood, grass, and alphalt over brick, concrete, and stone, or the overly wide streets and setback house lots, but the car noise is not that annoying, not like it is in east coast cities or especially in Europe. I grew up with a train line 200 feet from my house, two miles from the fault line the Whittier Earthquake struck in 1987, underneath the flight path of the space shuttle that sonic boomed every time it landed at Edwards AFB. One way or another, that old Trans Am was pushing it, but I don't think any car ever really annoyed me, at least not for sound. In Long Beach especially, most of your engine noise is going to get drowned out in the Pacific Ocean.
Living as an adult in Texas, full-sized pickup trucks taking up multiple parking spots and never seeing me or outright seeming to try and hit me on purpose when running or cycling gets pretty annoying, but even then the sound isn't a big deal. Except people that rev their motorcycles in tunnels. They're pretty bad. But rice rockets and American muscle alike live and let live. Enjoy your midlife crisis, my brother.