I think they were a misguided idea. There were equivalents in D3, but they were kind of cool because they had some kind of little story or scene attached to them. Like you go into some cellar on a burnt out farm and find a bunch of bodies and a diary complaining about increased goatmen sightings, or there’d be someone hiding from monsters to rescue, or something. They were fun to explore for exploration’s sake and made the world feel more alive.
The ones in D4 feel like they’re procedurally generated. Just a semi random tile set mated with a semi random event that has no narrative meaning whatsoever. They’re empty and soulless and generally don’t even have any meaningful loot attached so there is no real reason to bother with them.
It feels like someone borrowed the idea from D3 without understanding what made them interesting in the first place. Which, as it turns out, strikes me as a pretty good parable for this entire game - borrowed ideas that were then implemented in ways that indicate a lack of understanding of what made those ideas compelling in the contexts that they originally came from.