This.
Don't ever put anything into production that's not automated. Ever. "Oh it's a simple HTTP server that's going to be used by 5 people". Cool. Automate it. "Oh but it's going to take time!". I thought you said it was simple...
When things are not automated, we treat them differently. If a server is not automated, now it becomes time-consuming to setup another, which means it's now a pet, not cattle. But if it is automated and is misbehaving, we can easily replace it (and save the current for troubleshooting later if necessary). Or we can spin up 100 of them.
Same goes for development. If builds are not automated, they become more difficult to do, more error prone, which means people will avoid making contributions unless they are forced to do so (by some ticket). When contributing to a code base that has no guardrails becomes a lose/neutral proposition, people won't want to.
And now it's been 5 years and it's difficult to automate things because there's a 100 different workflows that people use and you are going to break them.