Why not let the lesson be that space content is pretty boring, or that resource management is boring. Just because they did it poorly doesn't mean that the type of content they made was the problem.
Procedurally generated content has been around for a long time and has been done waaaaay better than NMS did it. There are plenty of rougelikes that have interesting procedurally generated content.
As stated in the article, if they doubled the size of the art team, they could have had hundreds of times more models from which to generate creatures.
The possibilities could be near-endless but the execution in NMS was poor because clearly not enough effort was spent on building up the assets. The author believes that it would be madness to create such a full-featured engine and then abandon it so soon. I'm inclined to agree, until HG or ASA say otherwise, and then folks will probably start knocking out the NMS clones.
Could you please provide an example of the game where generated content is interesting enough to explore? Where it's not just decoration.
It seems like the emergent story in dwarf fortress continually draws people in (you might find this a stretch, but I'd argue that the game was explicitly made to procedurally generate a story).
It sounds like Ultima Ratio Regum is aiming to have deep procedural content.