The legendaries are not making crafting meaningful. They are making crafting necessary. There is a difference. Meaningful would be giving crafting some depth and progression. Options and avenues within crafting skills to specialize and craft specific items. The expense for crafters to get to the point to craft the max rank legendary items is EXREMELY STEEP. There isnt anything meaningful about crafting them. Its just a necessity in order to be able to give our character all its toolkit.
Thats the main problem. Blizzard has locked players character toolkit, behind a mandatory grind and expensive crafting. Forcing in to be necessary. Its a bad system. Not as bad as Legion’s RNG drop rate all expac.
Hell even letting crafters craft old tier gear. They can farm the matts and patterns by farming old raids. Then they can craft cosmetic replicas or previous tier gear. Players can either mog run farm, or buy a whole set off a crafter if they want.