I'm still very new to Pathfinder 2nd Ed, but I've noticed that the 6-part APs released for 2nd Ed go all the way up to level 20, while the first edition APs seemed to wrap up around level 15-ish.
I don't have a lot of high-level experience in any edition, but I'm curious what approach 2nd Ed took to high-level play that made them so confident in making adventures to max level.
What caused the previous edition to shy away from the upper teens that the current version doesn't have to worry about?
I suspect PF1's performance floor?average based balance VS PF2's performance ceiling based balance.
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Spellcasting got reined in a fair bit, while martials got a shot in the arm, and the math is overall much tighter. High-level 2e characters are not breaking the system over their knee the way their 1e counterparts did.
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They also used their extensive experience in writing six book adventure paths to help calculate page count per xp when designing the leveling progression or something to that effect. 1-20 in six books was not a happy accident. It was a deliberate choice when creating the edition.
Also, its almost all going to be in monster design. The reason that PF1 adventures capped out so early was that stat blocks for high level creatures were whole columns of text on their own, leaving less space for adventure.
Whole columns that you still had to look up feats for, ugh.
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PF2 statblocks are much more skin-deep, and they just go directly to "a monster of this level needs these numbers to do the job" so they no longer jump through all those hoops they did in PF1, and overall end up with better numbers.
Meanwhile PC stats are also far more predictable than in PF1, so overall as a writer it's easier to balance high level encounters in PF2.
Lot of abilities got simplified - PF2 tried to keep wealth of options, but implement those options wit more common components, so it's overall less information you need to hold in your head.
A far simplified buffing regime. In PF1 I'd often be juggling six different buffs that might or might not be active, at level 8. In PF2 you rarely have more than 1-3 active.
Magic lost a lot of it's "jump over the plot" stuff, and the stuff that's still there is signposted with Uncommon. Anytime the GM gives the players something uncommon, especially spells, that's a reminder that you have to keep that in mind in later plots. Don't have to forbid it, but you won't get surprised because the player took it and you didn't know they had it.
Also, I think experience with Starfinder; early on people began remarking that though those APs only went up to 12, they did so really smoothly and that home campaigns at higher levels also worked much more easily than PF1 (for generally the same reasons).