I can’t tell you what is happening with the PvE clusters, but this is not at all the case on the Whitemane (high population PvP) cluster. Herbs are fairly easy to come by. I’m usually not competing with more than a few other people at most in a zone and often I’ll have a zone to myself. 3k gold can be farmed in far less than 30 hours. Probably more like 3-6 hours.
I don’t believe this is even close to being true wherever they’ve introduced the WoW token.