Then they can’t exactly be a reward for exploring. Since there was no exploration involved.
Procedural maps are important. Though you can do them in many different ways, such as how Grim Dawn handles it (and D3) with premise exteriors.
Got nothing to do with dead ends however.
Are you going to admit that you are a troll?
Error 37 has literally nothing to do with the topic.
I suggest you try understanding the term exploration better so we can have a productive discussion.
Dead ends are a follow up of maps procedural generation.
It has to do with everything. Errors are fundamental part of D3 functioning. Heck, people on reddit qualify this as “absolutely crazy” like the D3 devs are trolling their players:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/mynwlb/its_absolutely_crazy_that_blizzard_have_let_a/
If errors continue to be part of D4 life time as they were in D3’s, we can actually stop discussing dead ends. 
No.
As you accurately said yourself, Grim Dawns exterior map is not procedurally generated. But it still has dead ends.
They are there by design.
And so are the ones in procedurally generated games. You act like dead ends are something they just can’t figure out how to get rid of.
Having dead ends in your map is a sign of good map layout, making the progression through the map more unpredictable, more fun. Allowing players to explore in different directions to see what they might find. Instead of always seeing everything each map has to offer, due to them consisting of a single tunnel from A to B.
In a good map, even if you find the exit fast, the player should feel a desire to check out the paths they did not take, wondering what they might find.
so the point is
you have a or several “right ways” that lead to the exit
even when you found them you would still be able to explore the whole map to find all the mobs and loot there is to find
thats a reward for exploration
Ok, I think I understood the miscomprehension issue. Skelos is part of the action-only audience that is the core target of D3, and other people discussing the matter are part of the ARPG audience.
So, yes, in an action-only game, dead ends are bad design, as it causes a pause in the action. You want players to be constantly in the action, thus go in a single-road tunnel filled with monsters straight into another single-road tunnel filled with monsters in order to have constant action, like shaking keys in front of a toddler to keep it distracted.
This is why D3 has a lot of railroad areas, why every objective is unexplicably just one area after one of the previous ones you encountered, why you have filler quests with extradiagetic rewards for every area you have to get through, and bosses that telepathically tell you their evil plans so that you don’t need to pause to think about what to do next.
But we aren’t advocating for an action-only game, we are advocating for an ARPG, and while these do have a significant portion of action, they also require ambiance, tailoring the character to the player, and a lot more stuff. And you don’t get those through constant action.
To get that, you need those moments of not knowing what path will get you to the exit, you need these moments of going to town to get information and lore. You need the game to tone down its action so that it can let its other aspects shine too.
No. This is not a classic RPG with different quest parts in different dead end corners.
A player visiting dead ends by choice (already knowing about these) is fine.
However, we are talking about a procedural map layout having dead ends the player stumbles upon without knowing. This is bad design. It’s like stumbling upon a parking area (or dead end route) with no sign for that. What you do then is making manoeuvres with your car and cursing the idiots that removed the sign.
No it’s not. You have been proven wrong, yet you continue this pedantic fight. Every dead end could potentially be a pathway to a secret area, a large treasure, a rare enemy, or even a side quest. However, if there was a reward at the end of every dead end, then that would be come the exception and exploration would feel more like an obligation or as the kids like to say today, “forced”.
The fact that some dead ends contain rewards and others do not actually encourages exploration. So you have three options, always rewards and exploration feels required not optional. No rewards ever, then there is no reason to explore and dead ends becomes an artificial slowing down method, or exploration is rewarded from time to time, which encourages it since you never know what’s around that corner.
I’m so curious what you believe exploration to be 
I’ve got a feeling there are like 2 or 3 parallel discussions here
1 - Maze level
2 - Monster density
3 - Pace of combat
Believed it or not it’s better when ALL three of these are low… The key ingredient is for the game to give you just a tad bit more than you can handle (quoting Hugo Martin here )
Fights 2 elites at once, fight one big baddie with a bunch of flyers, fight 2 groups of Summoners that summon stuff for each other, fight Fight 2 bad dudes with extra armor/abilities than they’d normally have
THOSE are the things that make the game nice and feel like the run has some point other than skipping everything, gathering mobs in once spot and “fire in the hole” and whole screen drops stuff all over the place…
IN FACT could argue if a game requires a loot filter then it’s a bad game
The key point/s is for the game to have enough diverse “rounds” of combat, i.e. not fight all the same stuff all the time (D3’s campaign is a prime example of this problem, level 1 = 15 Zombies, level 2 = 30 zombies, level 3 = 40 zombies and 5 zombie summoners, level 4 = 30 zombies, 10 zombie summoners and 5 grotesques, level 5 = guess what, Zombies again … And even later in the game in rifts, doesn’t matter if you have “everything” when “everything” is the same, you know what I mean ?, like, there are no differences between attack/defense/bruiser/tactical/summoner/healer mobs, all are the “same”, the only difference is how much “rounds” of stuff will you “spend” on them
If you just want to kill sh*t all the time and have the game “throw” at you then things like survival rounds or arena is more ideal… IN FACT would rather have the game have places where “rounds” happen (colosseums, temples, training grounds, birthing pools, e.t.c.)… That way instead of doing a “run” you just pay a fee/entrance to do a “wave by wave” round and have each new defeated round give you something better
In fact that’s what it comes down to at the very end…
P.S. for you who say you prefer “open spaces”, which did you like better in D3V, the act 3 spires or the act 2 Desolate lands ? 
I already posted you the definition above.
I can give you another example involving the fog of war from RTS:
https://www.kevin-indig.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/starcraft-fog-of-war-1024x574.png
That black space is the unexplored. Once you go and explore it, it isn’t black anymore. If there is a dead end, when you go back from it, you are traveling over already explored area.
There’s no need to have dead ends in procedural mapping since the player exploration capability is reduced. You can have all the rewards you want to put at the dead ends at other map spots.
“Players” don’t like anything. It’s a very diverse very large group. There is no feature in any game ever made that isn’t disliked by a large group of people. That’s one reason why all people don’t buy the same games. On the flip side if you tried to make a game so inoffensive no one would complain about it no one would buy it either because it would be dull as dishwater on an overcast day.
There almost always is.
Then StarCraft was a very bad example to choose for fog of war because it’s not only not procedurally generated it’s riddled with dead ends and the pathfinding is quirky at best. Explored territory given enough time is once again taken over by the fog of war and you can’t see any changes to it.
To have a game with fog of war and no dead ends is a huge waste of a valuable mechanic.
Come on. When you went through fog the first time, to the dead end, you were exploring…
Why would our exploration capability be reduced?
Leading to no exploration happening.
But not after that when you return.
As long as there is the fog of war, there is exploration to happen. Dead ends aren’t needed.
Which seems fairly irrelevant for the point that you were exploring when you went down the dead end.
Unless you want to argue that if you kill a boss in a Rift/GRift, you are not actually killing a boss, since you have to go back to town afterward, and you cant kill bosses in town. Or something.
To explore on 100% a map with dead ends you re-visit already explored areas, which means you aren’t exploring in 100% of the time, which would probably be the case in a map with 0 dead ends.
Said otherwise dead ends reduce exploration.
Just like you dont need to be able to have 100% action all the time, you dont need to have 100% exploration all the time.
If you have no dead ends, with a single path to your goal, there cant be any meaningful exploration. You are just going from A to B, seeing everything there is to see. Every single time.
No choices made.
You aren’t having 100% exploration since you almost never would explore the optimal way due to fog of war. It’s just more exploration without dead ends.
The map layouts without dead ends doesn’t consist only from A and B. I also never wrote we should have such layout.
Below are A to B layouts and these should not exist, just as dead ends in procedural mapping should not exist.
https://diablo.blizzplanet.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/bilefen-map.jpg
Disagree, linear layout is just fine, Y layout is just fine, X layout is just fine, we can’t all have “grid” layouts all the time, in fact doesn’t even feel natural
What is important is (as once already said) is for “deadends” to be worthy of exploration (or at least relatively worthy of exploration)
Sure, diversity is important.
In end-game dungeons, i would say linear layouts should be very very rare, if exist at all, however.
But in the overworld, and story set-pieces, it might happen of course, where it fits.
Got an example of how you want a layout to look?