Shouldn't the registrar do that? Namecheap sends me multiple emails when any of my domains is about to expire, it's just common business sense.
More likely what happened was that the guy who was incharge disappeared and/or his credit card number changed. And when the registrar tried to renew - it couldn't and I'm sure sent tons of emails of "HEY YOU NEED TO FIX THIS". Something similar almost happened to CentOS.
Gandi's customer support official response "don't use it". Gandi's management response "you are right - we don't have enough monitoring and are looking into it". With no follow ups.
At least they credited me, generously, for their latest outage in their US datacenter.
The problem with automatic renewals is its fine if you just have one domain. If you have a lot of domains it makes financial sense to shop around? I've always gone with the cheapest registrar(that I feel will be around in a year, or two), and never had a problem. Personally, I heard a long time ago the true cost of registering a domain is around $7.49. I don't know if that's correct? I don't like to pay much more than that per year--just on principal.
Since, people are throwing around companies, Google domains are $10 bucks a year/with free privacy. (At least they were a few months ago?) Godaddy did away with renewal discount codes; I see no reason to use that company anymore?