I agree with you that it's a very good thing, although I think the automation is less the end goal and more a means to an end. The end in this case being moving the idea of webpki certs from pets to cattle and the positive impact that has on the security of webpki.

The original idea of these certs, that they're very valuable long-lived secrets that have to be carefully hand managed and protected, while simultaneously being accessible to your active infrastructure, was always going to be too brittle. The idea of short-lived secrets that are regularly reissued allows for much more robust validation and less catastrophic failure modes.

I'm generally not dogmatic about this kind of thing and think there are often multiple right answers. But short-lived webpki certs are one of those things where if people don't see the value, I'm convinced they're not thinking about security correctly.