Let's be fair here. They've released, what, about a dozen books per year (or more) for the past 10 years. That's a frigging mountain of material. It's not unreasonable to want to update the system after that long, and that many hours of refinement.
It's doubtful they'll go full on change. But, they do need to stanch the bleed of losing players to simply aging out. People move on from hobbies. It's only weird assed people like us that stay with a hobby for decades and never move on.
And every game has the same issue - how to make sure that the number of new players is equal to the number of players leaving the hobby.
Imagine trying to get into Pathfinder in 2019. Where would you even start?
I hope they do pull this off. Having a stronger competition for 5e only means that both games get better.
The obvious place to start recruiting is among existing 5E gamers.
Without knowing for sure, I feel the vast majority of prospective gamers of this generation has already been recruited.
That is, thinking that Paizo has the clout to generate a meaningful number of NEW gamers is a pipe dream.
They should have taken efforts to make their game palatable to 5E gamers, because that IS the market (except the tiny sliver of old PF holdouts that still are willing to try PF2, a completely new and incompatible game).
And like it or not, this market of 5E gamers looking to widen their horizons *will* be horrified by LFQW, NPC prep, unbalanced looting and buffing, etc ..
If you haven't played 5E you might be forgiven a game like 3E or PF could succeed in today's market, if sufficiently spruced up. I strongly believe that is no longer true - not after 5E finally showed us all how you could keep the feeling of d20 but without it's fundamental problems (and without the radical failure of 4E).
I believe Paizo needed to do what they did with Pathfinder: Build upon the D&D edition of the day.
As a game not compatible with anything, what differentiates Pathfinder 2 from the countless heartbreaker clones out there? 13th Age, Dungeon World, Fantasy Age, Tunnels &Trolls... there has been literally *hundreds* over the decades, every single one of them fallen by the wayside. I'm struggling to see what Paizo offers what all these companies did not...
(Compared to those I am sure PF2 will be a big success. But that's not the question. Will PF2 be able to repeat the success of PF1, as pretty much the only non-D&D D&D game to even come close to parity with the 500 pound gorilla...)
I believe the market will tell. And 90-99% of that market has been raised on a diet consisting of 5E..
...and 5E alone...!