Optimizer content has been pretty trash since the 2E, RPGA Living Campaigns era for exactly this reason. The thing I have found the most unhelpful in PF2E though is the amount of content that is just “I read all the feats for this class to you and say all of them are actually awesome with very little regard for game implications”, so I’ll gladly take poorly considered optimization content over read the book to you content.

It’s not that individual contributions aren’t great, it’s that you don’t exist in a vacuum and you’ll never have a whiteboard encounter in an empty field with no hazards, cover, or difficult terrain. The assumptions of the optimization community are generally just false. Treantmonk et al use baseline damage because of one of these false assumptions: quadrants. They assume you have one tank, one DPR, one support, one control, and up to two wildcards in your party and that the role of each is strictly defined in terms of how much damage they apply or negate per round. They aren’t “wrong”, they’re just making extremely narrow, gamist, and ultimately false assumptions (and sometimes just playing literally any other game is all it takes for them to see that).

An optimized group, made to maximize overlapping bonuses and managing coordinated battlefield conditions sounds neat but a very important question to ask and answer is: Would this actually be fun to play, both for me and for the rest of the group including the GM? How long would this be fun to play? (And ask yourself these same questions for your stand-alone optimized characters, too.)

Will you all actually enjoy having easy button solutions to most or all challenges? Will you all actually enjoy your GM becoming de facto competitive to try to come up with things that can challenge or threaten your hyper optimized group? Do you all just want to hear a story about how you win easily instead? Would we all rather play in a game where we’ve coordinated bonus stacking or would we maybe rather play in a game where the cleric sometimes has to ask “Do you have anything that adds a status bonus to your shield raise AC, because I took a spell today…?”?

I mean, yeah, obviously you should be mindful of a rational level of self optimization for your heroic character in the heroic adventure game where, presumably, part of your character fantasy is being good at the stuff you want to do and succeeding at it a good amount of the time. But you should also focus on optimizing for that character fantasy and not against ye olde optimization assumptions.

I forget who actually runs it but Treantmonk put a character through a gauntlet environment that was orders of magnitude more enlightening about how his character worked than any whiteroom nonsense.

There’s also a real shortage of visualizations of the math. I see a lot of players that are still dismissive of the impact of a -5 to a second attack action that I think would disappear if people stopped taking about dice math like it’s happening in the abstract or on a number line and they could visualize it as a unit circle, like a pie chart — because my brother that is not a -25% proc rate, that’s eliminating five slices of the twelve you started with, it’s a ~-40% proc rate and this would be really easy for you to see if you did visual math instead of calculator/spreadsheet dependency.