My understanding is that they’re more autonomous, more extensible, and generally result in more widespread gains in efficiency than standard macros.

https://www.uipath.com/blog/whats-the-difference-between-rob...

RPA is something like "macros on steroids". It tries to be something like shell scripting for script-hostile GUI applications, but at least the one product I've gotten to play with is still way more clunky than proper shell scripting.

In response to your edit: I can see how GUI changes would be a problem for RPAs, but that seems solvable. For minor GUI changes, an RPA can theoretically identify where salient features have remained and just re-train on where they were subjected to change. If that approach fails, you can "show" the computer the new GUI and manually identify what changed. If that fails, you can restart training from scratch with the new GUI. That should take less time than training on the old GUI if the new GUI is any good. Maybe that's the best/cleanest approach in most cases and just becomes annoying with complex processes that need a lot of training data.

Keep in mind, though, that RPAs often link together different pieces of software, and if the GUI changes for one of them you'd only have to retrain on that piece. I wouldn't be surprised if enterprise software vendors start optimizing their programs for RPAs so that they don't have to rely on hacky GUI monitoring as much.

The end game is that large, frequently run RPAs will serve as a flag for the organization to develop, find, or outsource an end-to-end program that executes the same process without an RPA. RPAs, then, will always be the scout at the frontier of automatable office work, finding who can be freed from rote drudgery next and serving as a bridge to the best programmatic solution.

Only in the sense that it automates stuff. RPA is differentiated by its use of machine learning to "observe" your workflow and automatically create automations, even where it's hard to create a standard macro.

I’ve got a fairly comprehensive AutoHotKey script going on at work to macro the fck out of repetitive tasks in the CAD / CAM setup I use.