As others have mentioned, this is "just" constraint propagation. I think much of the success is that it's a simple idea to grasp and implement, that provides very good results, and has a compelling name. I don't want to be dismissive, I think it's very cool.

The original author of "wave function collapse" also has "convchain" [0] which is similarly "just" using Monte Carlo Markov Chains to sample the space. It's also a kind of "staple" algorithm for physicists, theoretical computer scientists, etc but I guess hasn't caught on as much as WFC.

Note that WFC has major problems when the tile set is too constrained. There's a SO question about it [1] and I also happen to have written a small article about it as well [2]().

[0] https://github.com/mxgmn/ConvChain

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72721299/why-can-the-wav...

[2] https://www.fxhash.xyz/article/lessons-learned-from-implemen...

() trigger warning, it's an NFT but please don't let that stop you from reading