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I think you alluded to it wonderfully: a small team with < 10 ppl will be fine with sharing knowledge and doing parts of the pipeline manually. The overhead of creating and maintaining a stable automation for edge cases quickly exceeds the time saved.

It's a different story altogether if there are multiple teams etc that are supposed to utilize the same pipeline

[Teletio]

My practical experience is with small teams below 10 people.

As soon as you have a well understood base system for automation (running code with Cron, monitoring and alerting) all further automationsteps are easy to add to that system.

The initial effort was always worth it.

And the big issue is, quality is very flexible.

If you need to do something every few days and you forget about it once and you get informed, did you heart someone?

Probably not but your quality suffered.

We even had a process which was broke for 3 weeks and a customer realized the issue, not us.

Automation was missing, monitoring and alerting as well.

One solution for a manual process was a Jira plugin which would create a ticket every Monday. It would describe what to do. Half automated. Purely manually would lead again to quality issues.