Why not both?

Use a procedurally generated map as a template and enhance it with manually designed parts.

Or mix and match manually designed tiles with procgen stuff. This is similar to to what OP's newer link describes.

Another option is to develop a DSL that let's you describe the map in various degrees. "Put a random city there" vs "Put a city with these types of buildings there" vs "Put a city with a pawn shop at the northeast corner, an armor shop somewhere south, [...]".

AAA games often use parts of this. For example for plants, many aren't put there manually by the designer but by randomized code and the designer just selects the area in which they should grow.

Indeed. Check out the stellar work Joe Garth is doing with Brushify.io [1] for the Unreal engine. His procedural landscape placement tools let you create beautiful game terrains very quickly. Watch the videos on the site for what you can do - triple AAA visuals for very little effort.

[1] https://www.brushify.io/

The advantage of this kind of tile-set, is the tiles don't have to be some fixed basic size. If you have a 2D Cartesian grid to fill, you could add arbitrary sized tiles (1x2, 2x4, etc) and they don't all have to be rectangles... So you could have variable sized features in your tile-set.

You could also allow the user to "paint" the grid with probability modifiers to adjust what populates.

You could combine... uhh... layer generative methods together. Start with a 2D grid. Adjust land elevation probabilities with underlying shapes (pick your generative method). Let this algorithm generate based on the "continental plates" from the previous step. Then apply a wind/water erosion algorithm.

Permute possible underlying algorithms in each layer...

The Diablo series follows a hybrid approach.

> On the other hand some games the game play itself is enough that randomly generated worlds are good enough? Rogue, Minecraft, Valheim, are a few that I've played.

The issue is not that it's randomly generated, but that to get really interesting you need more advanced rule sets. Minecraft, for example, has a lot of rules to alter the distribution of blocks in different ways. First of all biomes. Then lots of rules that alter the probability of different things based on biome, or based on proximity to something else. Then multiple levels of generation. E.g. huts are not randomly placed - huts are placed in a village - but the village itself is randomly placed.

That's not to complain about the linked article - it's awesome work, and the idea of using the tile borders is great. I think he could level up that generators quite easily to do even better as well - people have suggested things like applying it at different resolutions to e.g. first use the same simple rules to generate a biome map for example. It'd be really interesting to see how far the method could be taken while retaining a focus on really simple rules to specify how to connect things.