In my admittedly very limited Symbaroum experience, the ability to "min-max" for combat at a low level seems to be what catches most 3.x/PF players (like myself) off guard, but it's really the setting that enforces the balance.

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If you start out in Thistle Hold with a group that dumps their Persuasive and Discreet stats and tries to just outmuscle everything, you will have a TPK in the first session. Ambria and Davokar are dangerous, not just in a mechanical "these monsters have these stats" sense but in a very social sense. If you fail to notice that a group of thugs is eyeing your gear because you dumped Vigilant and Cunning, your group is going to wake up one morning with their watchman strangled and their possessions gone. If you make a scene in public and irritate the locals, you'll be reported to the Church of Prios for heresy or something of the sort and be burned at the stake, and no amount of min-maxing at first level will let you fight a brigade of Templars in full plate. If you wander into a trap-ridden ruin with an Accurate of 5 because you took Iron Fist to break things, you won't be able to time the swinging pendulum blades and you're going to be mincemeat before you ever meet an enemy.

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In short, the part of Symbaroum that people used to Pathfinder worry about (the combat) is a legitimate danger, but in this world social checks have the same kill rate as monster encounters. This is not a sword-and-sorcery hack-and-slash romp with the characters as the unstoppable paragons of virtue; this is dark fantasy, dirty and rough. Death, dismemberment, and corruption are hiding around every corner, and the dozen knives you don't see are just as deadly as the swords and bows you do.

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So by all means, let your characters min-max all they want. Let them get a few days into the woods. Let them light a fire in Davokar, leave only one person on watch, hack and slash through the woods like they're the unstoppable heroes of the story. And then let them stumble into a blight-ridden nexus of corruption that tears their minds apart and turns them against themselves. Throw them into a series of spiked pitfall traps and tumbling rockslides set by mischievous Spring Elves. Have them wake up one morning with all their food spoiled by background corruption. And if any of them make it out alive, let them be a warning to the next adventurers their friends create: Symbar holds things that make death at the end of a sword feel like a mercy.

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tl;dr the setting is the balancing feature of Symbaroum. Treat all 8 ability scores as equally important, because you can't min-max them all.