Yes it is actually an “hybrid” system between manually keyframed animations and IK/ragdoll as the author explains here GDC Vault - Animation Bootcamp: An Indie Approach to Procedural Animation
This approach can produce very good results like with this system:
FINAL IK - Full Body IK for Biped Characters - YouTube
It would be great to have this feature in Unreal Engine.
Completely procedural animation though is real movement and IMHO it is a basis for enabling more advanced AI, however to become interesting compared to the hybrid approach it would indeed have to be an online process, letting aside muscle constraints even with a basic model running optimizations in real time may be very expensive… I will still try to find a demo of a basic fully procedural animation and run calculations in real time with a good gaming pc rig, if it lags a lot well, that would mean that fully procedural animation in gaming is a Grail still way down the road^^'. An alternative would then be trying to implement an hybrid system like Final IK in Unreal which would already be awesome.