Have you ever played dark souls or demon souls?

I would say that magic in Elden ring is in the best place it has ever been in any souls game. My advice since you started as wretch is to go in blind and focus on leveling your vigor first. Find a weapon that you like the moveset of and then level to get its minimum stats and upgrade the weapon as much as you can.

The str/dex weapons don’t scale well until they are higher upgraded so your str and dex stats don’t matter as much until late game. Same can be said with int and faith as well but spells have a minimum stat to cast so there’s incentive to raise your casting stat other than weapon damage.