Notably missing is the most important, difficult and time-consuming (thus potentially defeating the whole purpose) phase: _maintain_ automation. The code will break, it will make incorrect assumptions, it will fail in rare edge cases, it will have unintended side effects, people will use it wrong, etc. "It works right here right now" is like 10% of the whole journey.

Not only maintenance of automation can cause more work than it saves. It has the potential to cause unpredictable, burst-like work in the worst possible times (for the maintainer or the users), which is a problem in itself. A steady background level of predictable, simple manual workload may be preferable to sudden bursts of complex troubleshooting.

I do not say "never automate", I say "life has a surprising amount of detail" so be smart about when to automate.