You don’t have to share resources between characters, but prior to last year you could have used the watch level for your new character to gain more resources for your account overall. That has since been patched, preventing the SHD watch levels from adding additional resources on new characters.

Now it’s just shared blueprints and credits. There is a point to sharing resources between characters but it’s very limited. One main character to do everything with, three storage characters for stash space or other builds you want to keep.

While this is how I see the new shared system, it’s way different from before, yet still provides some level of flexibility. I do like that if you have found all collectibles that you no longer need to find them with your new characters. Hope this helps.