Way back into the Whales era, yes. But NPCs were crashing the computer in the most spectacular ways, so Whales just straight out deleted the settlements for when NPCs became less buggy.
Since the NPCs are still crashy sometimes despite the vast improvements made since then, you can imagine how buggy they were a few years ago. >.<
The current rate at which the devs are adding new features to and removing bugs from the NPC is most excellent for now, IMHO.
