User intervention is (occasionally) needed in TeX only at its default settings, which are optimized for “rather than typeset any paragraph with a too-loose line, just give up and warn me loudly so I can take a look”. This makes sense for Knuth and his original goal of producing books. But it's not inherent; a combination of \tolerance=9999 (the default is 200) and \emergencystretch=\maxdimen makes it so that TeX will try to produce the best paragraph possible without requiring the user to intervene and rewrite the words. (Another alternative is to increase the stretchability and shrinkability of the interword glue.) And there will be no overfull boxes unless of course there's a single unhyphenatable word that by itself is longer than the line width. (LaTeX has a shortcut called \sloppy for achieving basically this, but the name scares people who don't understand the TeX algorithm.)

Sometimes I think this should be the default: definitely the worst typesetting I've seen is in documents produced by people who ignored all the overfull box warnings; even the greedy algorithm of Word etc would be vastly preferable to that.)

For basic hyphenation of text paragraphs, it's been years since I felt the need to intervene in (La)Tex hyphenation.

For typesetting more broadly, certainly. For making a clean right edge, no.