In Stockholm on a clear night you can see maybe a hundred stars. In the Atacama desert in Chile, where there’s almost no light at ground level for hundreds of kilometers, you can see four or five thousand. The stars haven’t changed. Same stars, same brightness, same distances. What’s different is the air between you and them — how much it’s lit from below.
Light pollution doesn’t add anything to the sky. It makes the air visible. Sodium and LED scattered through the atmosphere outshine the faint stars by competing with them. The Milky Way is up there all the time, even over a city. It’s just buried under lit air.
Better telescopes don’t help much against this — they magnify the same lit air. The fix is geography. You move to where the ground stops glowing.