You do need to be careful not to overtune this. I personally consider Terraria's 1.4 update a disaster for the game as it made the early game extremely linear; you really have to check off all the things one by one, rather than the previous situation where there was a recommended progression which gradually gives you the resources to reasonably perform the next step each time, but there were only a couple of actual hard gates and if you were pro enough you could focus primarily on the hard gates. (Doing a naked jungle run to get Moonglow for Spelunker Potions is fortunately still in, but you can no longer use Dynamite to break an orb (bonus points for no hook) then Dynamite out the Meteorite without any armor or a decent weapon to then fight the Eater of Worlds with the Space Gun. You have to go through all the steps of the recommended progression now.)
Last I played Terraria you could still Dynamite/Bomb Orbs/Hearts if you want. You should check out speedruns.
But the point, I still think more milestones would be benefitical for HnH so players can have some kind of meaningful goal to pursue, and for said milestones to be stretched out more than they currently are.
There's just not a lot to do after you get metal.