It's significantly better at it than the alternatives.
Even UBI. Sure UBI sounds great in principle, you'll be given enough to live on and you can spend your time doing whatever takes your fancy, but in large-scale practice I don't see it working.
Making the majority of the population dependent on the government for their income is not something that has historically worked well.
Two, the idea is not that people will goof off all day. Some yeah. Most, no. Most people will find work they like doing and do it. What does go away, however, is the fear of failure, unemployment and poverty. So they will have much better options to search for their most effective niche, rather than leaping in panic upon the first offer.
Two, ideas and reality are very different things. The idea of communism is that everyone is provided for and people give what they can and only take what they need. Sounds great, very altruistic. In reality, it's been a nightmare everywhere it has ever been implemented at a societal level because the idea fails to take in to account human nature. UBI proponents overlook or understate this factor too.
It's actually pretty good at it. The really fulfilling jobs like nursing or teaching go to those who are willing to sacrifice most other luxuries to do them; those who don't get a fulfilling job get more consumption to make up for it. Enjoyable work is a commodity like anything else.
I think the biggest challenge to this utopia vision (assuming automation gets to this point) is more that, frankly, labor is not wealth. Land is land for instance regardless of what is automated or not. Rent seeking for various things is rather common, most of which automation will not touch. I can envision strong resistance to any sort of UBI scheme from this group (some of this group frankly seem to not even care for our current safety nets now).
Before we go through a true "post work" phase, we'll probably go through a phase where service oriented jobs are the norm -- this is also harder to automate away completely, although probably not near impossible like tackling assets and rent-seeking. The main problem here is that this side of the workforce is currently rather undervalued IMHO. So if one wants improvements in the world of work, I personally think putting more efforts here would be better vs. banking on UBI.