The New World Pitfall

I'd assume they won't try to avoid that in the early game, because low lvl artisanry (or at least low lvl gathering) will be available to everyone but will also require the most resources, so everyone gathering stuff will properly fit into the demand for those low lvl resources.

And at higher lvls everyone will go down their own artisan paths, so everything will be split up amongst the players.

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The early gameplay of Ashes would be community driven in a different way, more similar to the early stages of a survival game.

Nodes will need resources for some of their bonuses/functional buildings to 'come online' (we do not have full information on this yet), so the large number of players will not be reliant on each other in a pure economic sense yet, but instead reliant on each other to get their nodes 'up and running' so they could even have an economy to foster other 'reliances'.

I would also expect that Intrepid would absolutely NOT want people to be too reliant on each other at the beginning, they would want players to be able to test everything. Not every player of this game type knows what they enjoy in terms of Artisanship, at the start, so it's good for them to be able to try everything and figure out which gameplay loop suits them the most.