Which of these two strategies is better for SEO?

Hi guys

I am currently building an industry-specific small business directory (ex: Plumbers) in Wordpress. The website will list Plumbers based on a location (ex: Toronto). Although there will be a national landing page from which users can select the location, I am expecting organic traffic to land on any location specific pages (ex: Plumbers in Toronto).

There are two ways that I found I can do this, and I want to make sure I use the most SEO friendly one while delivering a great user experience.

1: I create a single archive page that displays location based results. The URLs would look like: www.company.com/plumber/?location=toronto.
- This one is the easiest to build since it is only one page, and there is no risk of duplicate content.
- It includes internal search results to be indexed on Google, which seems like it's frowned upon..

2: I create one page per location
- There is a high risk of duplicate content
- I would have to create hundreds of pages
- No search involved and I can make a great breadcrumb with it.

My gut feeling is to do No 1 as it is a better technological solution, less work, and is more scalable. I also feel it is more 2020 than solution 2. This said, I know that if I build solution 2, it will be fairly easy to get my pages indexed properly.

What do you guys think?