Most of my work for SRE was the opposite; I did things manually because the automated systems were guaranteed to mess up some fraction of things. At some point my managers wanted me to automate a hardware management process- I checked and it would take 6 months to deploy the code to prod. Instead, I identified all the broken machines and filed tickets manually- getting things fixed far more quickly without a high rate of false positives and churn (google's hardware repair system churns a lot).

Many of the automated systems at Google were developed by geniuses. Others, not so much, and it ended up making a lot of work for other people.