Technology and the industrial revolution have been an unprecedented boon to the global standard of living. With them, we escaped the Malthusian trap and have achieved things that were inconceivable before. However, what would applying a similar scale of progress do in an RPG?
In our Princes of the Universe Exalted game we explored a high-scale, high-power game that involved a character that hyper-specialised in Crafting. By mid-Season 2, they were able to create basically a post-scarcity utopia city in the middle of the desert, complete with climate control, automatic food dispensers, crafting facilities, Big Brother-style AI, etc. Basically, everyone could live your entire life there in luxury and not have to lift a finger, everything was provided for them. Things only escalated from there.
After awhile a lot of problems could just be hand waved away with Crafting. Resource shortages? Throw automated mining at a mountain. Food problems? Automated farms. Money problems? Start selling perfectly crafted luxury items and dominate each and every market out there. Military problems? Create automated drones, power armour, a fleet of airships, etc.
While in Exalted if you wanted to focus on the minutia of Crafting it would boil down to a lot of rolling, in systems like Godbound (which Princes of Universe eventually adopted) such large-scale changes are ingrained into its Dominion system. Heck, in vanilla Godbound you can even make new worshippers to boost yourself even further...
Solving every problem
But back to the topic at hand. Just like technology has solved basically every problem that plagued our civilisations in the past, so too can high-end Crafting solve pretty much every problem a system might have. This is pretty similar to the Quadratic Wizards Problem (where in games like D&D warriors' powers grow linearly, while wizards' power grows quadratically and inevitably they dominate everything) - if there is no balancing factor, Crafting can make anyone else obsolete. A warrior might train a hundred elite monks, but a Crafter might bring a machine gun to a knife fight.
Moreover, if anything can be solved with Crafting, you can run into the Paradox of Plenty - if you don't need people to extract natural resources, till the fields, make things, etc., what good are they?
Sure, you can have them create art, engage in science and philosophy and do everything else that's not manual labour. That can work if you don't push automation too far, but I'm yet to see an RPG where the art output of a nation would be a factor (sounds like a pretty neat concept).
In the end the only thing that's the limit is the setting. In Exalted, pretty much the only thing you couldn't automate was prayers - you needed actual souls for those to work. This was ultimately the use for humans in our game - to generate worship for the demigod player characters.
It takes something from the man
While in real life having a post-scarcity fully automation powered society would be an undeniable good, in RPGs it can "take something from the man" (or the setting) so to say. It takes away a lot of the strife from the setting - you don't have to choose whether sending people to war would mean your civilisation would starve if they didn't return for the harvest, or whether to farm cash crops to pay for a civic project, or food crops to feed the populous. If a single character can solve any problem with Crafting / technology, characters that are not Crafting-focused feel inferior in comparison, and if Crafting can start making other player characters obsolete, the game can just feel bad to play.
This touches on the idea of hard magic systems, where while magic can be awesome, it also needs to have some limits, and it's those limits that make the magic system interesting.
For example, in Godbound, a lot of the high-end Artefact creation requires the use of Celestial Shards, parts of the Engines that run reality. Obtaining them is always an ordeal, and using them essentially always means you are letting the broken world stay broken rather than try fixing it. Similarly, every player character has access to the same ability to change the world with Dominion even if they are not a Crafter, so you don't feel like you're that lesser at fixing problems with your powers.
Technology as corruption
In most games, especially scifi ones, players will almost never not want to get their hands on some cool gadgets, shiny toys or useful gear. Whether that's through looting places or making their own if they can, they will want to get some tech. However, some settings have introduced a counterbalance to the wonders of technology.
The Fading Suns universe is built on the remains of a post scarcity corporate techno utopia. However, the current setting is a space feudal empire built around the Universal Church, whose central doctrine is that technology makes your soul impure and leads to the stars fading. While PCs will fall under the various factions that are given indulgences to use technology for the good of the people (an inquisitor using a spaceship will save more souls than it they couldn't use a spaceship for example), a lot of the setting will carry a stigma attached to the excessive use of technology. So while you could build be more machine than man and run robotic farms, you will be shunned by the peasants you displaced and the church might extradite you all the while keeping a close eye on what other heresy you might be committing.
This kind of thing would of course require some buy-in from the players and a balanced touch from the GM not to be a party pooper, but it can provide an excuse why you can't just rely on technology to solve all your problems in the setting.
Modern thinking
Another interesting topic relating to Crafting and technology solving a lot of problems is that it is a very modern way of thinking. We know where technological progress leads, so we may want our characters to start pushing the setting towards modernity by inventing / reinventing even such simple concepts as basic sanitation or an assembly line. However, we have to remember that sometimes it took forever for new technologies to be created. The first steam engine was first described in the 1st century AD, but it still took 17 centuries for the Industrial Revolution to start. It's fine to work within what the setting is and not having to push it to modernity.
Conclusions
If taken to extremes, Crafting, innovation and technology in RPGs can be setting-changing. On one hand that can be a pretty awesome feeling of bringing a world from the dark ages to a post-scarcity society as a result of one's character's actions, but on the other hand it can detract from the game if people wanted to engage in the sword and sandal fantasy rather than going into scifi territories.
You can try addressing the problem by choosing a system that balanced Crafting vs other professions or sets some limits on what is possible. Alternatively, you can actively try avoiding the problem by choosing not to have a focused Crafter in your game (we did that with The Living Years, where it was the more challenging way to play, and our motto almost became "if we only took Artifice...").
Like with anything, it's good to talk about your game's vision before the game starts. If you want to turn the setting from fantasy to scifi and people are onboard, go for it. If a game starts getting exponential and snowballing because of Crafting or something similar and you don't want to do that, you can ask people not to do that, etc.
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