Dealing out maor damage is probably, no joke, why the Fighter is far and away the most popular Class on the game
It is not. The fighter remained the most popular class in the game, even when it was out-damaged by Raging Barbarians, CoDzilla, and a host of other things.
The mechanics of the fighter have changed, sometimes radically, in each edition, yet it's popularity has been a constant.
It is the familiar, relatable concept of the archetypal hero, that's behind the class's enduring, Class-Tier-defying popularity.
Arguably, the reason there's such adamant insistence that the fighter remain a trap option /is/ it's popularity. Were the Druid mad a trap option, people simply wouldn't play it, but the archetype fighting hero is just too appealing, so system masters get to dominate play by picking a less popular, Tier 1 class, like, oh, Druid, and new players either eventually stop playing, gratefully accept it the way the proletariat accepts exploitation by the monied classes, or graduate to system mastery, themselves.
The topic of this thread, as to whether PF2 will be to Paizo what 4E was not WotC, is not about the mechanics. It is about whether PF2 will alienate PF1 fans or bring them along for the ride,
And that was very much about mechanics and class balance. 4e eliminated LFQW and made classes better balanced than ever - if still far from perfect, with fighters still sucking out of combat, and casters still having a non-trivial edge in versatility in & out of combat - and was marked for death by a segment if the fanbase that would not tolerate that, touching off the edition war.
5e returned to LFQW and more moderated (or at least, obfuscated) caster superiority, and is permitted to seek new players in relative peace.
. Paizo would prefer people to stay on board, while attracting new players, rather than the opposite. Time will tell how it goes.
Thing us, PF never attracted many new players, it attracted resentful D&D players.
No non-D&D TTRPG has ever attracted a lot of new players to the hobby - the closest claimant might be Storyteller in the 90s, but it pulled in new players on the LARP side, where it was dominant.
And the supply of resentful D&D players is pretty limited, especially now that 5e has put all the sacred cows back in the pasture.
On Reddit, the main Pathfinder sub has 73 thousand followers and almost all the chatter is focused in PF1: the PF2 sub has 4 thousand followers, by comparison.
Ouch.