The skinning hard cap changes are good. However, how fast you're able to raise your survival skill early is way out of proportion with how slow raising the quality of your tool is. All 3 early tools are gated by tree quality and clay/stone node quality, both of which progress painfully slow for new players who don't know what they're doing.
Adding string gives an earlier option to raise the quality of your skinning tool that's more in line with all the weird stuff that sprucecaps do early on like gather taproots, feeding clovers to sheep, or planting flax. Simple to progress skills like survival and farming playing an early role in the quality of the basic skinning tool also serves as a way for the game to introduce players to the ideas of quality progression and node searching in a way they're likely to discover naturally, rather than from a wiki.
Also how does the flint even stay on the knife without string Jorb?