People like them in the right situations, like your enemies in strategy games. You don't interact with their populations, civic choices etc, nor have you any insight into how the AI makes these choices, but it is still all there running in the game.
It isn't easy to create a hard rule of when low interaction simulations adds to the game, but it is clearly wrong to say that they are always bad.
I would point to "Ghandi threatening you with nuclear weapons" as a counterexample. Civ AI players were notoriously mercurial and their behavior is so bewildering that people developed elaborate theories about software bugs that are completely false to explain them (the "Ghandi becomes violent late-game because of integer rollover" myth).
It isn't easy to create a hard rule of when low interaction simulations adds to the game, but it is clearly wrong to say that they are always bad.