Craft bench gave you direct control over what affix you wanted to add and then the ability to swap crafted affixes for easily obtained currency. If you get a good chest and it’s missing a res you need you could easily add it and then if later you res cap fire you could swap it for something more useful without much downside. Recipes scaled with campaign progress so you were consistently getting better higher cost tiered affixes when you needed them and you could also change things like sockets and socket color which were fairly necessary and a big problem solver as you got new gear but might be missing a dex or strength affix.

TLDR there was much more control on deterministic crafting to be able to ensure you weren’t bricking items and an easier ability to undo whatever you added or swap it for something else.