Terrain algorithms: dead. Just brute force.
Though I kind of agree with that, "dead" is not 100% right. It still makes sense to use some kind of LOD in many situations, for two reasons.
1. Brute force is OK for small to medium view ranges but simply impossible otherwise, unless your resolution is extremely poor. If you have, say, a resolution of 1 meter and you brute force with a 2 kilometer visible range (which is about half of what you see in real life), that's a ... huge ... budget. Now if you think 1 meter is too coarse, you might want to add tesselation, which further increases the number of vertices.
2. Brute force creates a lot of small triangles in the distance. Small triangles are fragment shader poison. One does not normally want to have too many triangles that are "too small", in particular one does not want triangles that are hardly larger than a fragment (or, worse, smaller).
Insofar I would word it as "terrain algorithms are not THAT important any more, and may be unnecessary in some cases, while in other cases something very coarse is totally sufficient".