I hope it does come back. There is no faster way to create terrain than throwing a nice displacement on a plane, and adding Quixel meshes as needed. And some terrain types can’t be done just by patching meshes, like desert dunes or rolling hills. Placing tens of thousands of meshes, moving, rotating and scaling them individually into a naturalistic terrain, while powerful, seems like madness to me, and wouldn’t be appropriate for every project. I’m from a film background so not having displacement as an option in ANY 3d package seems unthinkable.
Ultimately, I’m hoping for a workflow/toolset that allows painting with megascans the way you would with alphas in Zbrush. If the tools are there, and the engine can handle it on moderate hardware, I’m all for this approach.