Building timers in older games were always somehow gameplay related.
Building a wonder in Age of Empires takes time, but the more villagers you assign to it the faster it goes. Even then it takes 5 minutes max, and assigning villagers to build the wonder means they won't be available for other jobs, so it's a gameplay tradeoff. Yes, RTS games have "real time timers" but usually those range from a couple of seconds to a minute, and not 20 minutes to an hour.
4x games like Civ also have timers that can get pretty long, such as 30 turns to build the Pyramids. But that's a strategic decision and turn time is pretty quick so 30 turns in game ends up being something like 5-10 minutes in real time. And since there's only one building slot per city it means that you can't produce anything else while the wonder is in the works. And if another nation constructs the same wonder first, your production is canceled! Ouch.
Games other than strategy games never had timers, especially not long ones. Crafting items in those games that had crafting systems was instantaneous. City builders, RTS, 4x games etc are games where you control an entire nation and not just a single character so a couple of your villagers spending 5 minutes on a single building doesn't mean you have to wait for it to finish, you can still assign the rest of your villagers to other jobs. It's all part of the same gameplay loop (assigning production tasks to your units).
Modern games with real time waiting times for crafting a resource in an action RPG aren't part of the gameplay loop. You play as one character or a small adventuring party. Assigning labor to them isn't part of the core gameplay loop.
Especially in a single character game, what is the actual gameplay involved in this?
You go to a crafting bench or whatever, put in the resources, then the process starts and it takes 20 minutes.
Then when it's done you come back and can collect the result.
It's a very passive and boring element of gameplay. You can set up several of those crafting processes (depending on how many benches exist for you to use) and then you set your clock for the time they finish at. Optimizing the process means running back and forth at just the right time (whoops, 21 minutes and 43 seconds have passed, that means the potion is done, time to go there and brew the next one to optimize my use of time!), which is annoying busywork.
There's nothing gained in the gameplay department by having such real time timers. A better solution would be to have the crafting table work once per day so you're still limited in how often it can be used, but it doesn't turn into an autistic time management nightmare.
