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It only becomes a problem in the stereotypical 'fight to the death for no particular reason' combat scenario.
When there is a plot reason for the combat, it mostly stops being a problem.
* The party is hunting the dragon to stop it from terrorizing the farms and villages in the area: The party is going to come prepared to fight a fast-flying dragon with things like Earthbind, speed penalty debuffs, or fast flying speeds of their own. And probably will confront it in an area that it has a more invested interest in defending, such as its lair. And may also be a more enclosed area.
* The party is ambushed by a dragon defending its territory: The players should run the scene as a chase scene where the party tries to evade the dragon and get to a safe location rather than fight it to the death.
* The party needs to get past a dragon to achieve some objective: The players can either run this as another skill challenge to get past the dragon, or the party can fight off the dragon in a running battle while they try to also handle the primary objectives of their mission.
They are fast enough that many published dragons are given tactics that interfere with hit & run strafing. And I factor in "dragons" as one of the creatures (alongside liches & giants) every build should consider facing.
But as you said, they're archetypes, and dragons sweeping past heroes is kind of stock imagery in fantasy, though half their PF2 speeds would achieve. I think their in-combat speeds should be lower and their Exploration speeds should (like way back when in AD&D) be what sets them apart. As it is now one could go really, really far summoning a dragon for even one minute much less if one gained control somehow.
So yeah, fighting a random dragon in the wilderness could become awkward for many parties (and kind of a waste of the gravitas of dragons) so dragons need stories to impel them to act well in one's game, with the simplest being they will die to protect their hoard so if you can track them back to it, the party's one step closer to victory...or so they think.
I'm not sure that I agree that they're all that good with hit-and-run when you see it in actual play. Even in a white room scenario, the dragon spends its turn Flying towards a PC, attacking, then Flying away. 120 feet sounds like quite a bit, but that's 120 feet without ascending which treats movement as difficult terrain. Even if our dragon flies just above the ground, the party still has a full round to just... run in the opposite direction putting much more distance than the dragon has in flight Speed between them. And this is all so the dragon can utilize its least effective form of attack (and still put it at risk from ranged combat).
Spellcasting leaves it just as exposed and forces it to choose just when it will remain in range for ranged combat. It can Fly close from far off to cast a spell (within an easy range) or begin in close range, cast a spell, and then Fly away. These really don't end up being all that advantageous for the dragon since the space created just creates a buffer for the party. The dragon, as the aggressor, is only taking defensive actions for the party, letting them heal up and Ready actions for its return.
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I think they're generally too fast relative to spell and attack ranges at high levels, yes. A lot of them can't be fought in the open. The few among them that have an effective means of attacking at range are obnoxious if played to kill the party.
You kind of have to set the fight somewhere that the huge fly speed won't matter much, or have the dragon be very aggressively trying to take down the party. Even then, it'd be really hard to keep the dragon from running if it felt it was at risk of dying.
If you integrate a dragon into a custom campaign, you may want to either nerf the flight speed, or make dealing with the dragon's speed an important narrative problem.
Fast dragons can be a problem if they strafe with their breath weapons. But the way actions are set up, you can usually deal with them unless you really build badly.
In a 3 action round, a dragon fly once, use the breath weapon, then they are stuck unless hasted.
To get them, you usually use a martial with flight and good movement (monk is best at this, but most martial classes can manage it) to close the distance and trip them. This will knock them to the ground where your other party members can get to it.
You also want to spread out so the breath weapon can't get you all at once, but still close enough to be within quick melee distance to be able to close it.
This is another reason why we always have a ranged martial in our group. They are too useful in situations like this.
At higher levels you have spells like earthbind or falling sky as well as mass haste to give you a movement action advantage. A lot of ancestries and classes have the means to get some kind of flight or knock out of the air ability.
You can also ready in PF2 to hit parts of the dragon even if they have reach that swing at you doing damage as though you hit them.
Grappling a dragon can also work.
It does depend on the party. You have to build really badly and not know how to bring down fliers for a dragon to be that hard to kill even with its speed. A dragon still has to be able to do damage to the party to win and if it does, then you can generally get to it to ground it.
Dragons have real low reflex saves most of the time, so trip is really effective at bringing them down.
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You could say that fighting a dragon in the wide open is like fighting a sea monster at sea - if you didn't bring the right answers, they're going to wreck you with their home ground advantages.
For dragons in particular a tactic to watch out for is when one PC is much faster than the rest and chases after the dragon. And then suddenly the dragon just goes full-turn murder on the lone PC, while the rest of the party is too far behind to help.
I kind of see it as a feature that if you try to engage a dragon where they excel (in the air in a big open area) that they have a huge advantage. GMs, don't randomly drop a dragon into a story. It diminishes dragons when used that way and an unprepared party can fail very easily.
A dragon encounter should be telegraphed, and a wise party will come up with methods to negate the aerial and speed advantage a dragon has.
Dragon quite often have fly speeds in the several hundred feet and so are extremely adept at hit and run tactics and the spellcasting variant can keep 120ft away whilat area effecting pcs.
In an open space they can be impossible for certain parties to deal with if they skirmish or even if the party can skirmish the fights can be drawn out games of tag which can make an encounter take too long.
But this does mean dragons are often uniquely challenging which fits for an archetype monster. Also interestingly fast speed seems more inconic to dragons in pathfinder 2e than breath weapons which you can find reskinned on a massive variety of monsters.
Honestly vs adult and older dragons it is a highly intelligent being that is also very fast and capable of flight. If the party did not prepare to fight such a being then chances are the dragon is going to strafe a bit and then if it does not feel like the fight is going its way fly off and come back later once healed.
Going into a dragon fight unprepared to deal with flying is generally going to lead to the party running for their lives or the dragon doing so.
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What the Bestiary/Monster Core maybe don't spell out totally explicitly, but is pretty obvious if you're paying attention: not all monsters have the same amount of "story power".
A big bear is still just a simple animal. You run into it and fight it, or maybe run away or have your druid talk it down. But it's usually not going to go "out of the box" in which you encounter it.
A vampire that can dominate people, turn to mist and recuperate in a well-hidden coffin, fly, create a horde of minions to zerg rush the PCs: that's different. Yeah, sometimes you really do encounter a vampire that's just... there, and you find it's coffin in the next room and put an end to it. But that does feel like it's doing a disservice to the whole idea of the monster.
Same with dragons, liches, wizards and so on. They're good as high-plot enemies.
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An enemy being high plot or not has nothing to do with whether or not it's tuned correctly though. There's already a whole system in place to denote whether a creature should be stronger than a bear or not.
... I think part of the problem is that Pathfinder is bad at thinking about large spaces in general. Dragons are alarmingly fast, yet the vast majority of published adventures are not really written with the expectation that that speed will be utilized at all, tons of encounters are written in enclosed spaces or with the assumption the dragon will simply stand and fight (which it's also good at).
So the dragon's speed sort of fails to get factored into its overall balance profile very well because it's often not relevant to the way many encounters are constructed.
Like I said I think to some extent this is a broader issue with PF2 (and its predecessors PF1/3.5) where range isn't really thought about as much as it should be because a lot of encounter design makes it less important. You see it a lot with weapon and spell design too.
I will second the notion that despite Pathfinder 2e's excellent balancing across most metrics, I think ranges and monster Speeds are kind of all over the place. While it does make sense for dragons to be terrifyingly fast in open air, there are few official encounters that make use of this, as most AP encounters put the players and the enemies in fairly small spaces. While the counter to the dragon's flight is mainly earthbind, often a high Speed just means "don't bother imposing a Speed penalty on this thing". In the situation where you're playing a homebrew adventure, you're facing a dragon without good access to earthbind, and the GM is running the dragon "smartly" where the it stays airborne and delivers breath weapons and lethal spells from a safe distance above, then you'll likely just want to run, but otherwise have that spell ready, especially against the remastered dragons and their (generally) weaker Fort saves.
An enemy being high plot or not has nothing to do with whether or not it's tuned correctly though. There's already a whole system in place to denote whether a creature should be stronger than a bear or not.
... I think part of the problem is that Pathfinder is bad at thinking about large spaces in general. Dragons are alarmingly fast, yet the vast majority of published adventures are not really written with the expectation that that speed will be utilized at all, tons of encounters are written in enclosed spaces or with the assumption the dragon will simply stand and fight (which it's also good at).
So the dragon's speed sort of fails to get factored into its overall balance profile very well because it's often not relevant to the way many encounters are constructed.
Like I said I think to some extent this is a broader issue with PF2 (and its predecessors PF1/3.5) where range isn't really thought about as much as it should be because a lot of encounter design makes it less important. You see it a lot with weapon and spell design too.
I see this all the time in published adventures. The dragon more often gets screwed than the PCs. They often put dragons in far too small an area that limits their movement. I'm not sure why the highly intelligent, survived for a 1000 years dragon would set itself up to get wasted by living in a small lair.
A horned dragon in the open should wreck most parties. If you get within 40 feet, it can charge and carry you 160 feet away in one turn.
The ability to separate PCs makes them more deadly then similar threats.
Your either prepared to deal with what it can do, or your likely dead. Even if your equal or higher level it's abilities make it a huge threat.
Without the speed it would still be a massive threat, charge, impale, fly up or over hazardous terrain. Getting free might not even be desirable at that point, fight one on a mountain and it drops you off a cliff.
I agree there are certain monsters like dragons that by the numbers work, but some of those abilities really have the opportunity to be much more threatening then the numbers suggest, and I don't think monster level is really able to reflect that. Ancient dragons have uncommon to suggest they could be problematic but a lot of people don't like the rarity system being used that way and adults don't have uncommon but can be very problematic.
The big question becomes, by the time you would face such threats, should you be ready to face literally everything around a corner, or are some creatures more worthy of some tag to express their complexity?
Dragons are known to be over-tuned in some ways, but I think this is one of the reasons dragons have a lot of their quirks. You fight them in their lair (which happens to be a cramped castle or cave), many are vain and might be tricked into fighting to the death or finishing the job with their own claws.
I think being dangerous on an open field or a Cliffside is kind of the point of being a dragon, and players should be able to narratively adapt. Dragon is breathing ice through the country side? Party finds a place to hide like a cave or outcropping, find where it sleeps. Threaten it's hoard so it can't leave. Find a place to bait the dragon into a trap, collapse a gate to trap them in a fort, etc. Homebrew some sort of siege weapon net launcher or harpoon to pin them to the ground like an earthbind. Do you injure it in an open field? Track it down to it's lair.
Dragons are special, you generally don't fight them randomly out in the open. It's a major story event that players should be able to prepare for or react to, and not some random encounter in a field.
Fighting a Dragon in a cave or their lair isn't necessarily better. In tight quarters you are going to have trouble avoiding the 30 ft cone breath weapon.
Draconic Frenzy means they can hit 3 times and still move away from opponents.
Also their version of Reactive Strike and long reach means you can't close on them or cast a spell without provoking.
Dragons did wind up getting nerfed in the remaster already-- their bonuses were lowered in many places, most notably dropping AC from high fl moderate in many cases. This brought them back in line with the creature building rules, rather than just generally being high across the board.
I think it's ok that they have abnormally high speeds in open terrain. Having a monster that can skirmish is more interesting than just another brute who stands there while you erode his hit points.
Yeah, having a campaign boss that can escape, pursue, or blitz better than most parties makes dragons exceptional though that pursue aspect means GMs need to finesse using them. There's no running away until the pursuer's bored when the pursuit takes less than a minute.
It does feel odd they're so much faster than Quicklings at a mere 100' (which is where Air Elementals seem to top out). That does feel too extreme, bulky beasts being faster than nimble characters defined by speed. Again, I think a faster overland/Exploration speed would suit them better, alongside a more reasonable (albeit still superior) combat/Encounter speed. Like say faster than an equipped, hasted Elf Monk of similar level, but not 3x or more that as it is.
That reminds me of a PFS1 special with an optional (above extreme!) encounter our randomly-assembled party should've opted out of. Our hubris would've led to a TPK since it was a dragon except thankfully enough of us could teleport or burrow! Whew, but even after teleporting we had to hide because it could circle so quickly. GM had pity on us...maybe because he'd kinda taunted us into opting in. :-P
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I feel like a bulky flier would have lower maneuverability, but not necessarily a lower top speed when you basically need magic to explain the physics of your flight anyway. Might be better represented by a lower acrobatics score?