Track history or don't bother?

Been a bit distracted this month unfortunately but I hope to get back on Plana now (or soon?).

I've been agonizing over the following question: should I actually bother tracking a history as the world is generated? For settlement we do a full "civilizational history" generation where settlements die, form or develop as time goes on. This worked okay but was very complex and takes some time to generate. Also it allowed me to naturally add paths in (popularity of settlements would change over time, paths would be remnants of that popularity).

For context, the image attached is a map with the settlements being marked by those pink (rather hard to see :/) crosses. The big pink shape on the left is just the cursor.

Now I want to add characters to interact with each other. But should I really bother embedding them in a history? It would be much easier just to plop them in randomly at the end. Would it really be so different? In theory if I was to properly make a history where the characters make an impression on the world then all kinds of emergent properties could be enjoyed. But I'm thinking in practice if I just generate the final state according to some distribution then the results are the same, everything is simpler, easier to add new dynamics and it's easier to adjust the final outcome. It's difficult to imagine the level of complexity needed before generating a full history actually makes things easier or better.

Sadly I think this means that my effort to create a thorough civilizational history might have been a waste of time, but I am certainly glad to come to this realization sooner than later.