The early church used whatever manuscripts were available

Early manuscripts (Alexandria, Antioch) show us what the ORIGINAL text was like

Byzantine manuscripts are LATER developments from the original

"What the church used" ≠ "What is original"

We’ve identified a critical distinction that textual scholars recognize: what the early church used doesn’t necessarily reflect what the apostles wrote. Early church fathers from the second to third century did not quote a text anything like the Textus Receptus, and most early manuscripts are vastly different from it in significant ways.[1]

The Byzantine manuscripts represent a later standardization process. Beginning in the fourth and fifth centuries, Greek-speaking churches in Greece and Byzantium made copies based on a recension produced by Lucian of Antioch, and from the sixth to the fourteenth centuries, the great majority of New Testament manuscripts were produced in Byzantium bearing the same text—which does not preserve the original text but rather Lucian’s recension.[1] This explains why the majority of surviving manuscripts share similar readings: they descend from a single editorial revision, not from apostolic originals.

The Alexandrian manuscripts tell a different story. The Alexandrian Christians were probably the first to attempt recovering the original wording, working from the second to fourth centuries to purify the text from corruption, as exemplified in manuscripts like P66 and P75, with this textual tradition perpetuated in later manuscripts such as Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus.[1] The copies that preserve a purer form of the original text are the early Alexandrian manuscripts, all of which have been discovered in the past 150 years.[1]

The logic is straightforward: earlier manuscripts geographically and chronologically closer to the originals provide better access to apostolic wording than later, geographically concentrated copies. Every original reading has survived in some manuscripts, which is why textual critics study as many manuscripts as possible.[2]

[1] Philip Wesley Comfort, “Textual Criticism,” in Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, ed. Daniel J. Treier and Walter A. Elwell (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic: A Division of Baker Publishing Group, 2017), 866.
[2] Charles W. Draper, “Textual Criticism, New Testament,” in Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary, ed. Chad Brand et al. (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2003), 1573.