There are mitigating factors in my campaign (see below). The intent wasn’t to justify it as a good practice so much as to indicate experience with the rule. I agree with your subsequent post that it’s not a good idea in the general case to have a significant gap. My practice historically has been to have new characters start with enough XP to reach the lowest level in the party (so 0 XP in PF2 but at a level higher than 1st), which results in a small gap (a level or so). I didn’t want new characters to leapfrog existing ones (especially since they got to pick their starting treasure).
My sandbox campaign is an exception to my usual practice, and that’s for thematic reasons. The PCs are members of an expedition, so there is a pool of extant characters to pick from when creating a new one, but we don’t create all of those up front. It would be tedious to create 40 characters all at once, and it preclude using options that weren’t available at the time (e.g., the expedition’s majordomo is a summoner). The idea was that players should eventually want to bring other characters along to boost them up (and increase the expedition’s base). While most players had multiple characters, they never mixed the groups. We’ll see how things go in OSE, but that’s probably a failed experiment.
As for that new character, there are a couple of things that allowed her to contribute. The first is we were using Proficiency Without Level. While you’re still fragile, everyone is operating on a similar scale. A higher level creature isn’t impossible to hit, and it doesn’t automatically crit you. That’s one of the things I had in mind when I wrote, “their ability to contribute may be limited depending on the size of the level gap.” She could hit things and make skill checks. If we were doing core proficiency, it would have sucked for her.
The other one is that I don’t run combat as an arena sport. My campaign leans much more towards combat as war, and dungeons are designed naturalistically. This campaign in particular is also exploration-driven rather than story-driven. When the new character joined, the PCs were exploring a megadungeon. There are multiple paths through the dungeon, so the party can avoid fights if it wants (e.g., they always avoided the passage with kruthiks). I also leaned pretty heavily on accomplishment XP when I ran PF2, so the party got rewarded for doing things rather than just fighting monsters (and I was looking to reduce XP from combat further and add XP for finding treasure [excluding magic items]).
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