Escort carriers were basically just merchant ships with a flat deck. They were small enough to build in ports that couldn't accommodate larger warships.
And they weren't really designed for battle - they were designed to protect convoys from submarines (at least the US version). They weren't as fast as fleet carriers, had smaller air wings, little armor, less range, almost no anti-aircraft capability, and not much in the way of damage control. As a pilot you really wouldn't want to be on an escort carrier.
Though it could be worse - you could be on a CAM ship:
In the Battle of Leyte Gulf a handful of escort carriers were responsible for sinking a fair number of Japanese capital ships, so they weren't useless in fleet actions.
Kind of depends on your definition of automation, I suspect many of those jobs were using much more advanced tools than their grandparents would have. If I were to build a fence tomorrow I'd be using a nail gun and bench saw to automate most of the hard work, as little as a few decades ago I wouldn't have had those tools.
Those aircraft carriers looked absolutely nothing like the ones from today. They were basically mostly normal ships with a flat top, thanks to the fact that they didn't have to deal with jets. Propeller planes needed no takeoff catapults and no landing hooks.
It wasn't lower standards so much as once you'd built twenty of them, building twenty more back to back allowed you to get really good at being efficient.
Today they keep switching things up so much between each iteration.
I don't know about the CVE, but the earlier Liberty ships were not particularly well constructed (brittle steel that resulted in some of them breaking in half in the middle of the Atlantic under cold conditions).
But for the few that broke in half, several more were sunk by U-Boots. They weren't expected to last many more years after the war (life span of only 5 years) and it didn't matter that much given the short term necessity of the war.
The escort carrier is by design definition created with lower standards. It sacrificed speed, carry capacity, armor and offensive weaponry for the sake of pumping them out as fast as possible.
I mean, when the base is a civilian ship, its clear that they're not working with some massively high standard to start with.
And they weren't really designed for battle - they were designed to protect convoys from submarines (at least the US version). They weren't as fast as fleet carriers, had smaller air wings, little armor, less range, almost no anti-aircraft capability, and not much in the way of damage control. As a pilot you really wouldn't want to be on an escort carrier.
Though it could be worse - you could be on a CAM ship:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAM_ship
In the Battle of Leyte Gulf a handful of escort carriers were responsible for sinking a fair number of Japanese capital ships, so they weren't useless in fleet actions.