Suppose you level as a primalist without minions. It is completely doable, thing is you get shafted because most gear pieces have minion affixes that are useless to you. While giving different base gear for each class saved half of them from the annoying endless minion affixes, if you are playing the other two you have to deal with them. I am almost always finding idols that give bonuses to minions and even in the rare cases they don’t - the bonus is for transformation. Going the simple way of melee or spell based character is discouraged unless you have some gear you can give them or a bunch of shards.
Solution: make minion affixes more common or straight up linked to certain pieces of gear while leaving others with bonuses affecting only the character.