Proximity, yes. But unlike before if you do decide to let everyone do everything now you’ll still end up biasing toward a set of dwarves that consistently gain proficiency instead of a freewheeling rotation of everyone doing everything and nobody getting good at anything.
It is a new paradigm to play through, and the immediate reaction a lot of old time players had was negative on this, but the idea was that instead of having to micromanage every labor for every dwarf, you can just let most things be open to anyone and it won’t be super wasteful.
There are a number of changes like that which are geared toward making something less tedious, even if some people don’t like the the change on principle.
I do think there is a lot of work to be done on the new DF but they’re out the gate running. Really need to implement a system to stop dwarfs from trapping themselves, which admittedly was never part of the base game but DFhack did a lot of QOL stuff that they should really incorporate into this new version.
