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Well, not the ability itself. I think it's a very fun and flavorful, and I wish some strength-based characters got something similar because yes, being buff enough can in itself be intimidating. The thing that confuses me is why this is a level 3 ability. I had the same reaction to the field test.
Intimidation, at least, is a skill that the soldier starts trained in, but has a hard time using without a charisma dip until level 3. Of course you might want to play a charismatic soldier, but if you don't, your main skill is really bad for exactly two levels.
Athletics is not that much more reasonable, if you take proficiency in it at all. Thanks to armor having strength requirements you would want something of a strength dip, but soldier gets Walking Armory at level 1 which makes that (and carrying capacity) con reliant! Currently strength is only really relevant to soldier if you play Close Quarters. If you wanna go athletics (which you might only want to if you go Close Quarters and want more strength anyways), you have an increased reliance on strength for a very short amount of time for some reason.
This ability encourages some very strange build choices, either making an attribute dip that (potentially) won't be relevant to you past very early levels, or playing at a pretty major disadvantage in skills you're nominally supposed to be good at for a (usually) negligible portion of your adventuring career. This doesn't even affect characters that start at a higher level since they can fully dump both of those stats with no repercussions. I would either move it to a basic starting feature like Walking Armory, or a level 1 feat if always starting with it feels too strong. But Soldiers should have access to it at level 1 because leaving it for later necessarily introduces the mess I just laid out.
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Also, unrelated (I guess semi-related because Intimidation), but Menacing Laughter doesn't specify that you don't get the penalty for not sharing a language with your targets (or otherwise not using a language). This is silly. *Laughs in Vesk* should not be a mechanically accurate way of describing this feat.
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There are a few instances of design in Starfinder 2e that strike me as rooted more in 1e’s design than 2e’s. This is one of them. Switching attributes on checks at 1st level clearly signals to a starting player that they can safely build a certain way and be good at those checks. Beyond 1st level, the switch punishes you for building your character to be good at the check it’s meant to be good at, while potentially bumping your check modifier significantly all of a sudden. If Fearsome Bulwark is really to be a mainstay on the Soldier, then it should be moved to 1st level, and the class should get something else at 3rd level instead (for instance, a feature that lets them Take Cover as a reaction to getting attacked).
There is a lot of MAD problems, especially early as Soldier. You want Dex for primary Target, Con for Class stuff, but you'd also be the most likely class to have strength compared to a lot of the other ones. even without close quarters. You still might be doing some front-line bashing and a nice flat bonus to damage goes nicely with that. My suggestion would be to make the KAS Str
I would say the Soldier in SF2e is actually one of the SADdest classes in 2e, rather than a MAD one. Besides Con and Dex, you basically just want Wisdom for your Will saves, and Con does the job of Strength and Charisma for you. In a system where you boost your attributes four at a time, that leaves room for one more on top of all that.
However, it's also for that reason that I agree with you that Strength would make much more sense as a key attribute: right now, the Soldier gets fairly little use out of Strength or Charisma unless they're branching into melee or skills other than Intimidation, so we'd be likely to end up with lots of low-Strength, high-Int Soldiers, which I don't think really fits the bill. On top of that, there's a lot of mechanics I personally dislike that are all about kludging Con into being the Soldier's key attribute by having it fill in for other stats, which I find largely unnecessary and stifling to build diversity.
By contrast, I feel the Soldier could run a lot smoother with Strength as a key attribute and some level 1 feature to let them use Strength for attack rolls with AoE weapons: not only would this make Primary Fire more consistent and avoid the kludge that is Walking Armory, it would also avoid the need for Fearsome Bulwark given how Intimidating Prowess is a skill feat made to let Strength characters be better at Intimidation (or Athletics could just be made the class's given skill instead). If Paizo really want to keep the "one class for each attribute" thing they have going on, they could just make the Solarian Con-based.
And for a 3rd Lvl Feature, a strength/con based one where, when firing an automatic weapon, you should be able to disregard a number of targets equal to your strength plus tracking. A good way to bring this into a more even field is that you lose the tracking bonus to your DC for each creature you ignore past half your KAS, probably to a minimum of -2. You could ignore 4 targets at level 1 for a -2 DC, but then you're targeting who you want. I don't know how to tie that into an Area weapon, but it could use some love in that fashion too.
I'd like that a lot. The Soldier sorely lacks features that let them avoid damaging their own allies with their own AoE, and a feature like this would make sure the class would always be equipped for that situation. You'd normally think a soldier class would be trained to avoid friendly fire as one of their first priorities.