pcb design - What are important uses of the "Net Tie" concept?

My understanding is that the "Net Tie" is a concept introduced by Altium and useful for Kelvin connections of a sense resistor and can not be applied in any other case.

Although it seems to be a useful feature at the first sight, it can't declare the exact connection point to the footprint, so it's not an exhaustive concept on its own, it still requires developer attention.

Example:

Given the following schematic:

We can either connect actual sense nets as follows (which is correct):

or as follows: (which is also correct):

or as follows (which is not correct):

by considering the same schematic using "Net Tie" concept.

However, if we would always handle a sense resistor a 4 pad component which has "Pin.1, Pin.2, Pin.sense1, Pin.sense2" independent of real pad count and placement; we can exactly declare "how" a Kelvin connection must be made.

As an example, we can define a 1206 resistor package footprint by adding SenseX pads as follows:

Is there any use case for which "Net Tie" is a complete solution?

Answer

Net ties are an extremely useful concept, if used wisely. If you are part of a team where there is dedicated PCB layout resource (or you have outsourced), the use of net-ties offer additional clarity with regards to the circuit designers intent.

They are useful for kelvin connections as you have show (be it sense resistors or 2wire RTD converting into a 4wire). They are useful if you want to constrain the layout with regards to where a node might be physically taken (ie distant constraint). Likewise their use when netnames may be merged is valuable. AGND tied to DGND at a starpoint for instance. if there is a branch in a digital clock signal where the resultant lengths are different (requiring separate signal integrity considerations)

it offers the layout and schematic engineer additional flexibility in defining what their physical intent is. It doesn't result in only only solution, it is one tool presented by the eCAD software (constraints being another).

Your example of the sense taps is a classic example and I personally would have created a separate footprint for that part to ensure the 4wire variant had the taps exactly where I would want them - between the pads