It does potentially create balancing problems. Gathering is a tax where you can self-fund your crafting profession in a more immediate way, but in exchange you give up having two sources of BoP or profession-specific mechanics. Example, most people will want Engineering since you need to pass the skill check to use the very useful items, but they’ll probably also want an armour or weapon crafter for the new BoP items.
The reality is that the really dedicated minmaxers and power gamers will just divide labour across their account and have two or three gatherers that don’t get to play with the fun new crafting system power scaling and fine-tuned character progression, while their real characters take two crafting professions.
There are economy considerations like gathering constantly injecting NPC gold into the game, and what to do about node competition when everyone is a universal gatherer, both with competing solutions to each other.
That said, an infinite flow of resources into the game tends to create other NPC gold sinks, as seen in Guild Wars 2, while also keeping crafting fundamentally economically accessible to people by driving prices down. Having crafting be a money loser tends to make people unhappy though, but I think it’s fine to have crafting actually be disinflationary on the economy because people are pursuing it for other reasons, like character progression or prestige cosmetics.
I’m honestly for it, but I think it’s tricky.