There was once a nice GDC talk from a Guild Wars 2 system developer talking about another guy who said: “When players say something is wrong, they are often right, but when players suggest a way to solve it, they are mostly wrong.”
While I do agree that there are never a situation in which someone is having fun wrong, there are many instances in which someone is using a game feature wrong.
The mere fact that you are arguing sorcery and weapons should be conceptualized as things to be used against each other already makes it show a wrong way of using it. That is the main problem.
I dont blame people for that. It is very hard for example to convey the concept that in a game like World of Warcraft for example, the game is not made so all classes can be fully effective against each other ideally. And that notion only drove the stupidity that makes retail WoW today be the dumb game it is. Originally, when the game was good, it was understood that you dont use certain classes on 1v1 against another, because you are supposed to lose. They are meant to make sense in group situations. Despite the fact that a given player can win with a disadvantaged fight against another given player who dont know how to use the class they are being given the advantage by playing with.
That is the exact problem. Maybe people are too used to those mods that do the idiotic class stuff in Conan Exiles, but the game is not designed to be that way. The game is designed so you use weapons you have, to do what you know how to do, and sorcery has features you find useful or not.
The game is not made to be a MOBA or a MMORPG for End Game Raiding.
It is a sandbox game with combat, building and other features, among which, there is a sorcery system.
Otherwise, the devs would have put fireball slinging, eye beam shooting and other stuff that turns “magic” into weapons with the express intent to give weaponized use of “supernatural” stuff.
The drawbacks and constraints are not “sorcery wide designed”, they are designed in a case by case basis, because, again, this is not Conan MMO or RTS. You are not supposed be a lone sorcerer who can use it as sole means of combat.
Watch all the Conan movies, all the Conan cartoons, listen to all the books (the Cybrarian in YouTube has a nice collection of them). In no way it is implied that sorcery is a sole means of combat. Almost all sorcerers will use weapons, corrupted, cursed, but weapons. They will use elixirs, necrotic, whatever, but still thrown vials or “orbs”. They might use necromancy, invocation, but still beasts and humanoid corpses and creatures, which do mechanically the same things “normal ones” do.
Again, no one is fireball slinging from their bare fingers, or beam shooting from their eyeballs.