I think views on the supposed restrictiveness of 5E depends on what sort of character type you favor. I tend to favor the arcane archer playstyle, which is niche in any gaming genre, and the one thing that has struck out to me the most is that 5E doesn't really have much support for dedicated archers in general. Tons of feats and subclasses for enhancing melee and magic, but almost nothing for archers in comparison. 5E Paladins in particular literally can't even smite with a bow. Warlock I guess can go with a hex archer sort of build from what I hear, but it almost seems like an accident rather than anything intentional.
Reading a Pathfinder multiclassing build with more than a single dip into another class always makes me question if I had a stroke on the way back home from work, so I don't bother with that shit on principle.
I also think PoE2's dual class/multiclass system is extremely good, but even that game had a lot of trap builds, though not through the fault of the multiclassing system itself. I feel that game was heavily over-sanitized with its balance, if that makes any sense. A symptom of subclasses basically pigeonholing you into playing in a very specific way, and not adhering to it hit you with penalties outweighing the benefits. Rangers getting a major stat nerf whenever their animal companions were KOed among them, unless you took the Ghost Heart subclass.
PoE2 would have probably been a lot more interesting build-wise without being utterly overwhelming and redundant like Pathfinder's system, if it toned down all of the malus from the subclasses (if not getting rid of base classes and striking away all of the subclass malus entirely) and had you dual class by default, meaning there'd be no single classing or being locked out of later skill levels as a result. It's the direction I hope a future PoE3 takes to really differentiate itself from all the other cRPGs in a gameplay sense. It's not surprising that the most popular multiclass options in PoE2 involve classes whose best abilities are frontloaded. Cipher's Time Parasite in particular would have a lot of interesting interactions with the other classes, if it wasn't solely locked to single classed Cipher.
