I don't see why you can't have both. AFIAK, Netbox doesn't have do any automation out of the box, you need to do that on your own. It's not going to start changing the configs on your devices. Your configs are not necessarily going to tell you how many rack units a given device is or the orientation of it in a cabinet. Being able to visualize the infrastructure and your IP space is extremely helpful.

At Network to Code, we are trying to solve for this exact problem.

https://docs.dolthub.com/use-cases/application-databse/nauto...

I've certainly dealt with that in the past, but the reports, scripts, and webhooks in Netbox helped us automate our documentation QA.

Whenever data is altered, QA gets an immediate ticket to validate it and the reports give them the ability to quickly check it against our real-time inventory system.

To catch the case where data isn't entered, all project tasks and work tickets need to be associated with one or more Netbox updates, and QA confirms that as well.

There's no solution to this problem that's purely technical. In my experience you need to make it as easy as possible with your tooling, but you still have to have processes in place to catch mistakes and omissions.