Something I don't understand is the absolute phobia of service accounts. There are things that need to happen regardless of who is doing it. Emails need to get sent every day with reports, for example.

Forcing these workflows into the nonsense security theater of "we can't have service accounts" is stupid and unproductive. So every time we fire or lay off the person whose name is on the automation, we need to rotate the keys? What is the benefit here?

If you are screaming "managed identity" here, I have a bridge to sell you because clearly even Microsoft has not been able to figure out or implement managed identities for internal workloads... Well not as of 2022, at least.