[xg15]

I'm reminded of the game Factorio: Essentially the entire game loop is "Do a thing manually, then automate it, then do the higher-level thing the automation enables you to do manually, then automate that, etc etc"

So if you want to translate that, there is value in doing a processing step manually to learn how it works - but when you understood that, automation can actually benefit you, because only then are you even able to do larger, higher-level processing steps "manually", that would take an infeasible amount of time and energy otherwise.

Where I'd agree though is that you should never lose the basic understanding and transparency of the lower-level steps if you can avoid that in any way.