I liked the ability to build a lot, but felt that the integration with the rest of the game was not great. It was basically a feature largely disconnected from the rest of the game. You could:
Slightly improve defensive layout of the settlement, making it easier to defend against settlement attacks.
Have settlers that gathered scrap or food, reducing the need for you to to so.
Provide a resting place, marginally useful if you were playing without fast-travel (though healing items also tended to cover this).
Increase area where Minutemen could be summoned with the flare gun, which I never did.
Increase number of trade caravans on the road, which could provide you with some randomly-wandering allies.
Build crafting stations, to reduce distance to go to reach one. A bit useful if one was playing without quick-travel or was overloaded.
Build shops, including a few high-tier shops.
There was a single mission that focused on building, the one where one defended the Castle against the Mirelurk Queen.
Other then that, you were just building for fun. Maybe a sense of role-playing accomplishment in rebuilding the Commonwealth.
Fallout 76 let one share one's CAMP with other players (though the size was a lot more restricted than in Fallout 4). While there were some visually-clever things that people made (albeit not always thematically fitting with the game), I still feel like the integration with the rest of the game wasn't great. The survival (mandatory food/water) elements were nerfed, so having a place to get those wasn't so important. There were radstorms, and one could build shelters from them, but they were very weak. There was automated resource production, but it was pretty limited in rate. I'm not sure that it was worthwhile other than maybe if one made a Nuka-Cola-oriented build and auto-gathered that. The ability to capture areas on the map and hold them was a neat idea, but generally wasn't something that players seemed to like much; the rewards were limited and the PvP aspect was unpopular. The major benefit was to provide a stash box or crafting station near boss fights, and to provide a player vending machine to trade in excess loot.
For me, building is something that I like, but where I feel that it's a neat engine feature whose in-game potential has gone dreadfully underused.
Sim Settlements was IMHO something of an improvement for Fallout 4. This does sound a bit like the direction in the article, so we'll see.