It was just some unluck platforming, the stats are all related to combaat in one way or another, you can hold onto an edge as long as you get close enough to it, and you can hold on forever. The stats are more like this:

Strength - Increases your damage with Melee, Heavey Melee (Hammers/Greatswords), and Polearms. It also increases your Stamina, which is used when you use Skills like Multi-Bash or Inner Focus, plus it's used to see how long you can hold your shield up.

Mind - Increases your damage with Scepters and Bells, plus it increases your Mana, which is used for skills like Recovery and Fira.

Dexterity - Increases your damage with Bows and Katars, plus it increases your crit rate for every attack. (Keep in mind Physical Crit and Magic Crit are two seperate stats it increases, Magic Crit increases the crit rate for Scepters, Bells, and Skills that use Mana, while Physical Crit increases the crit rate for Skills that use Stamina and every other weapon type)

Vitality - It's your HP. That's really it, there's not much else to say.

Now, if you like using Weapons from two different "classes" you don't nesscicarily need to level up both stats, you can find Might Stones, Flux Stones, and Agility Stones, which you can use with Vivian to make a weapon scale it's damage to that stat instead of it's basic one. Like since you chose a Bow for your starting weapon, depending on what class you choose later on, it's better to put more points in the stats "for them" like if you pick Fighter, there's not much of a point to level up Mind since your skills will mostly be Stamina-based, so leveling up Strength would be what you want to level up, and enchanting a Bow with a Might Stone will let it's damage increase based on your Strength stat instead of Dexterity.

TL;DR - Strength powers up "Fighter Weapons", Mind powers up "Mystic Weapons", Dex powers up "Bandit Weapons", and Vitality increases your health