To be honest as long as a game has a very specific story to tell or a very clear lore to follow I think keeping everything scripted ( even if you allow X ^10 permutations) is the way to go. Simply because as a dev it gives you control over what's going to happen and under what conditions.
I'm saying this as the best example of the genre OP specified for me is Kenshi. A game that is 100% built around those system. The amount of "scripted" events where the player has a set of pre-defined choices and not generic systems interacting with each other is close to 0 . And yet the game almost never ends.
Very cool topic OP. I will say more once I watch the video and had time to read everything from others.
