Yeah this one’s interesting. I think sadly its best synergies are in other colors. Turning your artifacts into food is super interesting, but it doesn’t make anything else into an artifact.
The most I can see with this is that you can combo it with Academy Manufactor like you mentioned, which might lead to a combo deck where you make a ton of cheap artifact tokens and they make treasures and clues to draw and play the entire deck. But breaking Academy Manufactor is not really that impressive.
Worst case they can come up with a new name in the future.
I’d love to see this token used in more places in the future like we do with treasures, clues, food, maps, etc but it might take some time before it’s reused if they’re waiting to see how it’s received by players.