I love hooks.
Modules with prewritten hooks are incredibly useful for me when DMing a larger sandbox campaign. The more we’ve play, the more that’s become evident.
Hooks help me as a DM when I’m placing the module.
Hooks help the players make informed decisions about which locations they want to visit.
It’s true that I can read the module and come up with my own hooks. The inverse of that is that pre-written, provided hooks help me place the module before scouring it line-by-line. Hooks is the perfect name since it helps me hook the module right in place in a bigger world. Rumors about the location can show up far and wide, making it an impactful place and not just a one-hex silo.
It saves me an incredible amount of work to just paste hooks onto the job board or the rumor table. Hooks are one of the key reasons to use a module instead of just throwing out some geomorphs and random tables.
They also allow me to use modules of all kinds of sizes. A three room li’l lair has the same connecting interface as a ginormous gigadungeon. I can also add homebrew with the same interface.