It does, but the pathway can break down if you graduate from your local CC and can’t get into your local four-year university, because it’s become too selective.
In California, the cost of housing is often greater than the cost of state school tuition, so students routinely try to keep college expenses down by living at home and commuting to school. But for this strategy to work, (1) there has to be a public university within commuting distance, and (2) you have to be able to get into that local university.
California has done a reasonable job with (1); obviously you can’t put four-year universities in every possible location, but the coverage is pretty good. However, certain parts of the state are starting to see problems with (2). Certain regional state schools that were never intended to be elite or selective institutions are getting huge numbers of applications, and are therefore becoming increasingly difficult to get into.
If you do reasonably well at your local CC, you will get a place in the CSU or UC systems. However, California is a large state, and that place could be at a campus hundreds of miles away, rather than at your local four-year university. This radically alters the financial equation.