lc3507,
This is an old article from 2019. The way they ranked it were based on 5 criteria:
"
To construct our ranking, Bankrate looked at eleven public and private datasets related to the life of a retiree. The study examined five categories (weightings in parentheses): affordability (40%), crime (5%), culture (15%), weather (15%) and wellness (25%).
Affordability was calculated using scores from the 2019 Cost of Living Index from the Council for Community and Economic Research, the percentages of people who needed to see a doctor but could not because of cost in the past 12 months from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and rankings for income, property and sales tax rates from the Tax Foundation's 2019 State Business Tax Climate Index.
Crime was calculated using the property and violent crime rates per 100,000 inhabitants for each state from the FBI’s 2017 Crime in the United States report.
Culture was calculated using the number of arts, entertainment and recreational establishments per capita,restaurants per capita and adults 65 and older per capita from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Weather was calculated using the average daily temperature from 1985 through 2018 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Hawaii’s temperature was calculated using the available data from the Honolulu weather station.
Wellness was calculated using the rankings from the Gallup-Sharecare Wellbeing Index, the number of places providing services for the elderly and people with disabilities per capita from the U.S. Census Bureau and the number of health care benchmarks states achieved or exceeded in the National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Reports provided by the Agency for Healthcare and Research Equality For this study, Bankrate only looked at the benchmarks that included data for all 50 states."
https://www.bankrate.com/retirement/best-and-worst-states-for-retirement/
And, yes I agree this is subjective.