Interesting thought, but I’d rather the villagers just be able to do that in very late-game situations, which I hope gets added to the vanilla game someday, or for the modded(?) scenario you describe. Since there’s a population cap to worry about, I wouldn’t want to delete villagers just to make room for artisans, and then delete artisans to make room for villagers, and so on.
If a modder wants the artisan added to be able to leverage for their mods and scenarios, I see no harm in that. I just wouldn’t want it in the base game for the late-game ideas I mentioned before here: