The advantage of Work Camps is in being able to set them on a dense area of resources, which they will steadily gather and deposit all of their gathered goods inside the camp itself. Wagons will then come pick up those items in big piles and bring them back to town, versus villagers coming to grab a couple logs or stone at a time across long distances and having to make several trips to do grab all the piles left behind.
Another trick to Work Camps that’s perhaps overlooked, and possibly how people are deleting all the forests from their maps…if you use less than the max allotted workers (ex. 2), they will generally chop down trees roughly as fast as they grow back. So rather than having one or two Work Camps of 4 villagers obliterating forests, three to four work camps with 2 workers each can work on a forest for a very long time, if not indefinitely, and generate the same amount of wood per month.