Also, there's another bit of nuance to that, as well as your overarching point about "automation isn't free," in that writing Terraform/Tofu isn't usually the long pole in that tent: debugging the raging PoS most certainly is (along with its associated https://xkcd.com/303/ of waiting for the "plan, attempt apply, puke, goto 1" loop)
And, in almost the exact same vein: writing any automation carries with it two downstream bits of work: monitoring the automation and having enough context to debug it when (WHEN) it falls over
Also, there's another bit of nuance to that, as well as your overarching point about "automation isn't free," in that writing Terraform/Tofu isn't usually the long pole in that tent: debugging the raging PoS most certainly is (along with its associated https://xkcd.com/303/ of waiting for the "plan, attempt apply, puke, goto 1" loop)
And, in almost the exact same vein: writing any automation carries with it two downstream bits of work: monitoring the automation and having enough context to debug it when (WHEN) it falls over