Even back 15 years ago, EAGLE's autorouter was pretty decent if you used it right. Lay out power traces, ground planes and anything high speed or sensitive (analogue signals etc.) yourself, then let it do the busywork of hooking up all your blinkenlights and push buttons.

There are certainly things you shouldn't delegate to an autorouter, but in the same way, the trend towards hair-shirt-wearing insistence that everything be done manually is a productivity cost.

It's no different to programmers who insist on hand-optimizing assembler: Rarely necessarily any more and usually done more out of ego.

You do know EDA is about more than just PCBs, right? Good luck routing millions of nets in a microprocessor design by hand...

The really competent engineers use the tools for the bulk of the problem, and fix up by hand where it makes sense.