My argument is nothing was going to make all that be true. The only time new editions sell as well or better than the prior edition of a game are usually when the prior edition was notably problematic to a large part of the market (i.e. the D&D 4 to D&D 5 transition). Otherwise you almost always lose some of your market in such transitions.
The question ends up being, does what you suggest seem likely to improve this loss? And I don't have any evidence that's particularly likely. To the degree there's a market that wants some of that, they're either diehards staying with PF1e and unlikely to change anyway, or are 5e fans who already have what they want.
Its basically a categorical error to assume that anything, absolutely anything, was going to get much better result than they have now, and the comparison to 1e is problematic because 1e was a success to at least some degree because it was carrying through theD&D 3e fandom when D&D 4e came out and went in a different direction.
I also consider the VTT question to be so muddied it doesn't really demonstrate anything.
The APs not being as well received is an indicator of the fact the D&D sphere has been notoriously bad about not fighting the last war when new editions of games come out; take a look at the history of early D&D3 modules (where people were, effectively writing for AD&D2 rather than the game at hand) or the attitude toward the first couple D&D 4 adventures (where they didn't apparently understand their own math). Paizo had the advantage in their early PF1e adventures that they were transitioning to a game very similar to D&D 3.5, which they'd been doing adventures for for quite some time; any problems were likely to be things that were largely system independent. The first two Adventure Paths for 2e, on the other hand, were the same old "writing adventures for the new game system like it was the old game system, with accompanying problems". Any issues people have mentioned with any of the successors have, again, been things that would be problems whatever the game system was.
So your argument only makes sense if you assume there's any practical way they weren't going to have some contraction of market given the current RPG environment, and I have little sign that's true; nothing they did was going to prevent that. To a large extent quite how big a chunk they had was a historical accident and them taking advantage of same, and I suspect they knew good and well when going to 2e it was going to happen, but it was better than the alternative.