So, to be fair, there is a magic crafting system in Xanathar's Guide to Everything, which uses downtime and allows players to spend money and time enchanting an item with the proper effects. Much in the way that Plane Shift and Dream of the Blue Veil are limited by what material components the DM is willing to give you, here you need a "formula" and some special ingredient that is guarded by (or is part of) a monster of an appropriate challenge rating for the rarity of the item.
The place of magic items in D&D is sort of an odd one. In 5th edition, at least, characters are built to be functional without any magic items - except perhaps just "any magic weapon" for martial classes, given that so many foes can resist or even be immune to ordinary weapon damage.
But while you can run a game generally where what few magic items the party gets are a carefully curated list the DM comes up with, there are various skills and features that make reference to crafting these items.
The Artificer is a class built around using tools to channel magic into otherwise mundane objects. In fact, Infusions are explicitly described as "prototypes for permanent magical items" in the class feature description.
Artificers get a feature at level 10 called Magic Item Adept. In addition to increasing the number of magic items to which you can attune to 4 (eventually you can have 6,) it also says that when you craft a magic item that is common or uncommon in rarity, doing so takes a quarter of the time and half the cost.
But how much time? And what cost?
There are no rules for making magic items in the PHB or the DMG. We do find them, however, in Xanathar's Guide to Everything in the chapter called Downtime Revisited. But these are optional rules.
Which means that a class feature refers to rules that the DM might technically not even have the book for (at least in theory, a group should be able to run a campaign with only the core 3 books and Eberron: Rising From the Last War or Tasha's Cauldron of Everything).
So, I think that there are a couple reasons why you'd want to implement a magic item crafting system into the core rules. For one thing, it would be a way to let those with proficiency in artisan's tools actually do something with them for a change. How often has a player been able to really make use of a jewelry-maker's kit, or woodworking tools? But if the jeweler could produce a Periapt of Wound Closure or the woodworker could construct a +2 Shield, well, that would make those proficiencies a lot more interesting.
The other reason is that I think that the game could use more gold sinks. When you first start off, the Paladin, Fighter, or Cleric (about half of them) will eagerly try to save up in order to eventually buy a set of plate armor. That 1,500 gold is a huge amount in the early levels. But once that purchase is made, it's rare that players are going to find other things to spend their gold on. Crafting magical items is a way to force the players to do a little more than just spend money, but makes spending that money feel like a real boon to their player power.
But on the other hand: maybe not.
See, I made a mistake early in my Ravnica campaign. I had a goblin fighter (now multiclassed as a paladin) who sought out a Sunblade - a magical +2 longsword that, among other things, does radiant damage and an extra d8 of damage against Undead.
And you know what? It's a bit overpowered. Especially given that there are a fair number of undead creatures the party has to fight. Obviously, the whole point of the weapon is to be a great thing to use against the undead, but I think there's a question of the role it plays.
In Curse of Strahd, there's a (I think maybe slightly altered) version of this weapon, but finding it requires deciphering the clues you got in the Tarokka reading at the start of the adventure. This is one of the keys to defeating the vampire lord, and its discovery should be a moment of awe and excitement.
And maybe you shouldn't just be able to walk up to a store and plunk down some cash for it.
In fact, this one item (well, and the fact that I have given so many out that the players need to strongly consider if they're willing to un-attune to any of the items they already have before they take any of the new ones I give them) has made me seriously re-think how I want to handle magic items in the next campaign I run. I want to dramatically increase their rarity, and if I can, build a story out of each one (I'm also tempted not to give them any basic +X weapons).
Players have a lot of sources of power in the way they build their characters, which makes selection of their own magic items perhaps too much. Indeed, I think you could argue that the whole Artificer Infusion system for that class makes personal selection of magic items into a defining class feature - one of their primary sources of power that sets them apart from other classes.
What is the gold sink, then? Obviously, Wizards will need gold as long as there are spells they don't have in their books, but for other classes, they usually hit a point where any additional money they find is about as important as your score in Super Mario World - a vestige of an older game system.
And maybe this post started off about magic item crafting and is turning into one about the role of gold in D&D. I think you could probably run a game of D&D in which you never really deal explicitly with gold as a reward or as a cost, and I think the game might actually work fine that way.
Of course, the real answer to all of this is that it depends on the kind of campaign you want to run. My Ravnica game, which has showered the party with magic items and gold, is a heightened one in which the players are basically superheroes (well, some are supervillains, but they're all on the same team). I want the players to be powerful and even if I can sometimes get frustrated when a monster fails to land a single hit, I like the idea that the players can rightfully feel powerful and unstoppable, as it suits the tone of the campaign I've been running.
I guess the sacrifice you make, though, is that any individual magic item is less impressive as a result. I homebrewed a weapon with a deep story that ties itself to a villain, and which will grow more powerful if they redeem her, but to be honest, at this stage, it's actually probably not as powerful as the Sun Blade.
I think DMing is a constant act of experimentation. You're always adjusting your style, your methods, and your expectations to pursue a more enjoyable game for you and your players. So, you can take either side of the title of this post and decide what works best for your campaign. And if you find you're wrong, don't hesitate to change things up.
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