I can totally believe no complaining, especially given the players signed up to it, and anyone who would likely have complained was thus eliminated from even being involved.
Well, they didn't "sign up for it" so much as we had a discussion about it, and even the players with casters felt spamming cantrips each round was too much. Some concerns came up, so we gave it a trial run, and it worked well for us.
1 + Stat mod Jinxes is likely 4-5 combat cantrips for most PCs (6 at higher levels) per SR. 5E is balanced around 6-8 combats, usually of 3-4 rounds per adventuring day and 2 short rests. So if your group takes regular short rests it's not surprising that was enough Jinxes, assuming every other round they used a leveled spell.
Well, we don't follow the "adventuring day" concept really. Encounters happen when they happen, all story driven. Our battles do go longer, maybe 5-6 rounds per instead of 3-4. We do follow the 2 short rests maximum like many tables.
But otherwise, yes, we see more leveled spells being used, which is more "magical" than spamming cantrips for us.
I am slightly surprised people didn't buy light crossbows, though - they're actually more effective than combat cantrips a lot of the time on classes which don't get some sort of damage or to-hit improvement with combat cantrip (assuming a decent DEX).
Probably because when this stuff comes up, people seem to focus on Wizards.
Our clerics, druids, and warlocks are often melee due to good ACs, wildshaping, and hexblade. We still get some ranged warlocks with EB, though. Sorcerers and Wizards with d6 HD do tend to stay ranged, but once they reach 5th level the scaled jinxes (cantrips) damage is more than enough to consider light crossbows instead.
What I don't entirely get is how this ended up different from normal though - because your limit on combat cantrips was pretty high, there's no real reason not to use them every round you would have anyway? You're complaining about the laser light show, and that's a perfectly reasonable aesthetic complaint, but did your changes actually result in significantly less combat cantrips being cast? It seems like they wouldn't have.
As I mentioned above our battles tend to be a bit longer, so a caster could burn through all their jinxes in one encounter if they wanted. But since we don't have an guarantees of when a short rest will come, that is risky in its ways. I'm not saying it is often difficult to get in a short rest, but you just never know.
Overall, I would say it cuts spamming cantrips by about half. Now, we
might go back to an earlier rule we had that solved the same problem and is easier in many ways:
You cannot cast attack/damage cantrips two rounds in a row.
The idea is the magic for your cantrip needs one round to recharge. You can do non-attack cantrips in the round in between, or cast a leveled spell of course.
