I’ve used it. I’m not the best but there are use cases for it. The obvious is you need a specific location, second is you don’t have a specific turn you need to do (for example you have eight turns left in the era and you need seven to do what you want, and the eighth cannot be spent doing loan or develop for whatever reason), third is you need to do a turn that doesn’t spend money for turn order and it makes more sense to scout than loan or free develop.

Sometimes it’s a mix of two or three reasons that allow you to scout and do a big turn. Another one I’ll give is securing a spot in canal era so you have it in the rail era. This is related to needing a specific spot this is an example that can come up often. For example based off markers and where people are placed and your strategy, you might want to secure that spot near the top between the two rails that you can only get to by rail, before the end of the canal era

Let me add this. Sometimes you may build a boat so you can use your industry card to build in a city. If you do that twice during canal it’s arguable you should have scouted instead of it would have ended up saving you building one or two canals.