I have been summoned!
I agree with Gus and Yochai on all points.
I will also add that a lot of dislike for pointcrawls that I have encountered seems to stem from a lack of understanding the variety of ways they can be implemented. Even Chris’s original blog post has a lot of potential uses, such as hidden pathways and distinct trail types, that naysayers like to gloss over.
I do think there are use cases where hexcrawls really excel. Truly desolate and unexplored territory, mythic landscapes where fixed pathways are few and far between, territory that lacks much in the way of geographic barriers, and very large scales where you theoretically could find a path in any given direction and the particulars beyond terrain can often be abstracted away. I think Mythic Bastionland is a textbook case of something where the Hexcrawl format arguably makes more sense than a Pointcrawl due to the lack of permanent pathways and the quantum nature of the Myths.
However, I would argue that there are a lot of maps that just don’t make sense as a hexcrawl given the scale they are dealing with, and I sometimes see designers flail around for an alternative when Pointcrawls are right there. The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford, which is one of my favorite modules, has a map that is about the scale of a single 6-mile hex, and so the author made a vector map where you are essentially forced to measure distances in order to know when to trigger random encounters.
When I encountered this and was unsatisfied due to the utter lack of satisfaction that picking a random direction with no information to go on and measuring progress with a ruler brings at the gaming table, I was shocked to find that proposed solutions were either a hex grid overlay or a pointcrawl map where every location was put on the map without a care as to what pathways would be hidden or secret or how to convey that information to players.
The former solves the measuring issue, but doesn’t help the fact that 9/10ths of the hexes that you traveled to being empty is a not great table experience, and the latter ignores all of the actual advice that Chris’s first blog post actually laid regarding different path types and hidden information.
This is ultimately what drove me to develop my Player-Facing Pointcrawl method, but the foundation was laid by this series of blog posts and the designers that have since tried their hand at the method.
Good Pointcrawls are harder from a level design perspective, and certainly more difficult to make player-facing compared to printing a blank hexmap, but I think they should be considered more often than they are.
I think we have barely scratched the surface of what they are capable of doing for published material, though I hope to make my own contributions to the form soon enough.