I have several thoughts on this, I will preface them with that I've played 7 dtd sinc a14, with about 1,400 hrs in the game, and I haven't played A22 much, but I have played a fair amount in a21-
I do like the crafting mags for things like 6 quality tools and weapons, because it prevents wasting skill points just to craft a group of items. It also prevents there being like one item that only one possible magazine can teach the player how to build being annoyingly elusive. I'd rather need alot of a common lootable item to learn how to craft, say herbal antibiotics than rely on a chance of the quite rare schematic popping up. For the case of herbal antibiotics it also kind of makes sense- read alot of magazines about what plants have what chemicals and what chemicals help fight infections and you can kind of figure out what plants can fight infections. That being said, for certain things it is game breaking and forces a narrow scope of gameplay, particularly-
crafting seeds and cooking low tier food items- when players can't feed themselves and levelling up does NOTHING to change this, death is just completely irrelevant. Oh, I lose experience? experience and levelling up is worth nothing if it doesn't get me closer to being able to survive sustainably. Irrelevant deaths just means instead of players setting up bases strategically, building or learning to fight, gameplay is just running around with a bedroll, looting, dying (sometimes intentionally) to progress faster until food and water is produced sustainably. This is a bit less the case in single player, where looting food can be sustainable with respawnable loot, but 4 or 8 players each eating a bear's worth of food every day will deplete lootable food sources fast enough that planned death expedites advancement, since all players must loot. Forcing all players to be looters can also be incredibly monotonous; base builders or miners may not like looting any more than looters would mining or base building. This is inferior to the old system, death started out being minorly relevant and became more and more relevant as players levelled up.
workstations- bad luck should not bottleneck in a survival game; Running around with a tier 6 machine gun for ranged attack and a wooden club for melee because that is what you find (if you don't find an army of forge ahead's to build your own stuff) is fine for a bit, but the whole point of a crafting game is to have choice in what you build and do. Feels more like being a clown than a survivalist.
Some things are also immersion-breaking; crafting potato seeds from potatoes is literally learning to put potatoes in the ground- teenagers who leave a potato in the fridge too long literally discover this before a 7 days to die character would. Something humanity discovered thousands of years before written language shouldn't be on par with trucks or gyrocopters.
In a nutshell- Reading a bunch of mags to craft advanced level things like M60s or foods with special buffs is fine, but basic stuff that fundamentally shifts play (workstations, the general ability to produce drinkable water and foods that you only need one stack for 2 to 4 days of food like bacon and eggs or vegetable stew) is best not left to RNG. I've played blood moons where my best weapon was a stone spear (on this particular run, RNG made it so I did not have a forge to make any metal bullets and looted bullets run out very quickly in blood moons. never found metal weapons. Found metal tools galore though) defending a cement POI that I had fortified with brick. On day 80. The first blood moon doing that on day 40 was a trip. Doing that same exact thing for the next five blood moons because forges were left to RNG was absurd.
Quests do lessen the randomness of mags quite a bit, but that is only if you find a trader who sells the mags you want. Doing quests can be a fun aspect of the game, but doing quest after quest just to buy mags can be a bit monotonous even if the trader does offer the mags you want.
And then there are things like cement mixers- we don't necessarily want players building cement castles on day 3, at least not without significant sacrifice in all other facets of gameplay. Maybe best to make tying building the cement mixers themselves to levelling (that way high-level players who just haven't had the luck can still produce cement) but perhaps the ability to accrue lots of rock to advanced tools that require lots of magazines is probably the best route to go there. Farming used to be kind of like this (before mags were needed for seeds); if a low-level player wants to build a farm off the bat, they can but it takes all their time to gather the resources so their progress in other areas is significantly delayed, wheras in later game when you can gun down zombie dogs for rotten flesh and mine soil and nitrite with power tools/ metal tools it is much faster to set the farm up then, and levelling lowers the resource cost.
I think others on this thread have mentioned that is does not pace with levelling- Not that it is really possible for RNG to line up with steady progress but that seems very much the case in my experience (my levelling is ALWAYS miles ahead of my crafting, chests full of things that are useless because nothing can be crafted from them, points to help weapons utterly pointless because the weapon itself has not been found and cannot be crafted yet), even on games where I intentionally die which delays levelling up.