I recall a lot of hype more than a decade ago about all the textures going away and being replaced with math formulas to generate everything on the fly. Games were supposed to get dramatically smaller. What ever happened to that?
On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have Inigo Quilez ( https://iquilezles.org/ ). He literally draws with maths, and he is famous for his 4k demoscene productions. The problem is that about no one else is capable of doing what he does.
Because of this, its very suited to math and procedural generation. You just change some parameters, render and show. Games instead have to do this in real time, with less latency and CPU/GPU usage. And procedural/math generated content tends to be CPU heavy (more usage+latency), if not also on the GPU (cant be cached, etc).
Shaders are more on the middle of this, because you want to apply certains transformations to and from rendering data.
Just my armchair observation.
Asset production is already the bulk of the cost of AAA video game production.
Anyone who thought this was incredibly naive.
I look around my room and try to think about what textures could be generated procedurally. My walls, carpet, and ceiling? Yeah, sure. The stickers on my computer? No way.