Procedural generation's history mirrors that of symbolic AI - hand tuned, interpretable procedures that parallel the conceptual models we have of a generating process.
The choices the author made reflect the way they conceptualize the generating process. This is in contrast to a data-informed approach.
A data-informed approach to island generation would be a spatially auto-correlated generating model whose parameters were derived from real life data on islands. You would then be able to generate more in-distribution islands that were statistically similar to islands in the corpus.
You don't often see this in the proc-gen world because part of the fun is adding epicycles and various tunable knobs.
The choices the author made reflect the way they conceptualize the generating process. This is in contrast to a data-informed approach.
A data-informed approach to island generation would be a spatially auto-correlated generating model whose parameters were derived from real life data on islands. You would then be able to generate more in-distribution islands that were statistically similar to islands in the corpus.
You don't often see this in the proc-gen world because part of the fun is adding epicycles and various tunable knobs.