Sometimes I've gone the other way. My manager complained once that I didn't automate a task to get business metrics, and I responded to say that it currently takes me 1 minute to pull the metrics and paste them into a spreadsheet and print a PDF. Automating this would take at least several days, for a slide that changes constantly, and where the data often requires a deep dive into why the data is how it is. What's the point in automating something that I already need to manually look at?

They raised it with our PM, and their response was "fair, I wish I hadn't bothered to automate things last year".

If the cost would give a higher benefit, sure, automate it so that it spits out a spreadsheet every week and do the manual stuff separately - but automating something "because you can" is junior level shit. My time is valuable, let me work on stuff that actually matters.