It’s especially bad in D&D5e, where the artificer can create any common magical item, but it has to be selected at level up and can’t be changed, and since the game is so focused on High Fantasy, all of the common magic items are completely worthless, since the interesting stuff happens at higher rarety. In the end the system makes the Artificer a reskinned magic user where everything is worse than a plain sourcerer.
This is done in movies and books to give the reader/watcher a chance to learn the setting without getting hamfisted about it, stuff is naturally explained to the character because they don’t know it either. That’s not necessary in TTRPGs, since the player can always ask out of character.
Also, it’s a way to get some character into the story the reader/watcher can identify with. This also is not necessary in TTRPGs, since there the players naturally identify with their character (at least in most games, some do that differently).