The task system was always a straight-up addition to the game, and did not impact drop rates.
The original focus of the task system (which I proposed and designed, so let’s please take my word here seriously) was to help get resources to early players, while exposing them to game systems. I knew that the tasks didn’t scale well for high-end players, but the plan was to address that in the future.
Unfortunately, the way the task system was set up high-end players would do HUNDREDS of tasks a day, which allowed them to totally blow the resource curve out of the water. So the task system was adjusted to close this unintended use case. The current task system still helps new players with goals & resources, but we scale the resource rewards up much faster, while keeping the maximum number of possible tasks per day low.