I disagree. It often saves artist time to use a procedural. You don´t have to unwrap and you can just throw it at a bunch of objects. The render might take longer but longer render times often don´t matter.
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This. I prefer usage that strikes a good balance between “procedural” and using image textures. Use procedurals for creating coordinates or masks, not the final texture used by a material (color, normal, etc). If you do, cache the result via baking or rendering (too bad we don’t have an automated cache node).
Low and slow or high and fast… or somewhere in between.
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Of course images aren’t always better. Just most of the time. There’s certainly situations when it’s
faster to use a procedural, or to take a mixed approach. You don’t necessarily have to unwrap your object to use an image, there’s triplanar mapping and the like after all, which will work perfectly fine for grunge, architecture, nature, etc. - anything that doesn’t have a precise pattern. But even with more man-made, less boxy things, an unwrap doesn’t necessarily take a long time when you’re not doing memory-restricted hero-assets for realtime.
All I’m saying is use the right tool for the job, and there’s no point in limiting yourself needlessly.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s often fun to make a procedural material in a sort of “Look mom! No images!” sort of way, but then you’re just playing around instead of doing your job 
As for performance - it always matters, if only for how much time you’ll waste waiting for preview renders. And for every minute of animation, shaving off a second per frame means half an hour shorter render. It stacks up real quick.
As I said, I disagree. For my work (usually product viz with lots of imported CAD geometry) procedurals most of the time work better for me. I rarely use bitmaps.
So, as you say, use the right tool for the job. And procedurals are often the right tool.
Faster previews are nice indeed but shaving off a second per frame is not really relevant to me. My renders usually take somewhere around 30 to 60 minutes per frame on my home PC. Since rendering is dirt cheap these days it doesn´t really matter to me if I can shave off 10 or 20 percent of the rendering price by using bitmaps instead of procedurals.
Until your boss: “We need you to change this tiny thing, you have 20 minutes”, and you know it involves setting up the change and the render must be a full re-render.
Proc vs images, it also depends heavily on what the texture is. I much prefer proc for random stuff, bumps and so on. But if I need text and labels, specific round stone pattern, or any pattern that is hard to impossible to do, why would I even try? That said, I do proc patterns more than is probably healthy, but that’s what I’ve always been most fascinated with.
I have no boss but If I run into deadline issues I simply render with 200 instead of 50 render slaves. It doesn´t matter that much price wise.
Well, procedurals are obviously a bad choice for text and labels and I doubt anybody would disagree. Patterns that are impossible to do, well, they are impossible, so it doesn´t make sense.
As for “hard” to do, this really depends. Sometimes it makes sense to invest some time in order to save time down the road. Sometimes it doesn´t pay out, so it depends on your experience if you can predict if an investment is worth it.
Anyways, if you enjoy making procedural patterns and they don´t allways pay off I see no issue with doing it anyways. If the only driving factor of your work is what makes the most economic sense then you should probably quit your job and become a consultant. 
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