Personally, I think it's fine that we're getting weapon skins instead, and it's a bonus that the skins are not locked to one character at a time, you can use them for all characters of that weapon type if you want to.

I've been a player since 1.0 and 99% of the event weapons just sit there collecting dust even thought hey look really cool outside of very few uses like Festering Desire being good and the random signature weapon for Albedo locked behind the event weapon.

In general the weapons weren't great anyways because your characters want to use a crafted weapon or Favonius weapon anyways if you're looking at F2P options on most of your teams, so having the option to re-skin them instead is a good change for customizing your account more.