[AstralStorm]

We had some experience with this, and the device under test or even testing harness can fail, so you need a local operator to fix things anyway.

It is more feasible to ensure no such failures the simpler the device is, e.g. with a good hardware watchdog setup. We did it with a rather complex stack.

[detaro]

Of course, you also need someone and somewhere to set it up in the first place after all, but it makes a big difference between "you need the entire team in one place" vs "you need a place that has a test engineer or one member of the team available/on-call". (To continue the parallel from /u/hinkleys comment, lights-out management is useful even though the server still can't swap a broken disk itself)

Seeing that now with Covid at customer sites: only 1-2 people from a larger group in the office, who if needed can go poke devices, while the majority works remotely (which often includes contractors that otherwise would be in hotels etc). Generally not optimal, since many don't have the amount of automation one would prefer, but workable and with room for improvement.