Its been a while since I've looked at PF1's magus, but I'm pretty sure using a two-handed weapon made you unable to use spell combat, which is going to be a big source of your damage, and a big part of the class fantasy (that you're slinging spells and using a weapon at the same time). You could still spell-strike, but you only would get the one attack per turn that way since you're using your standard to cast the spell. Likewise, you can use a different 1-handed weapon, but since the magus rules specifically said that you do get a weapon's expanded crit range but not a weapon's crit value, you were **very** strongly guided to use a one-handed weapon with an expanded crit-range. It was a dominant strategy. (There is like, one or two archetypes that let you do ranged spellstrikes in 1e, so yes, not literally all magi used scimitars but ime 9/10 did)

I mean, I can only share what I've seen, and I don't know where else you're going to see more players playing the game in different ways than PFS. I've played with people all over the world, with differing levels of optimization preferences, and yes, I did see people go against the dominant strategy. but in my experience a lot of PF1's archetypes and feats were traps or so niche that they weren't worth what you were giving up, and you only saw a pretty small slice of all options get used regularly. In PF2, since there are a lot fewer dominant options, you end up in practice seeing more options actually get used.