The UI is a physical interface between human and computer. It's a representation of tools. A direct analogy here is to physical tools. Imagine you were a car

The UI is a physical interface between human and computer. It's a representation of tools. A direct analogy here is to physical tools. Imagine you were a carpenter, on a tight schedule and with commitments to deliver. Every few months, you walk into your workshop, and not only have your tools been rearranged, some have been swapped out for different sizes, and some even removed outright. How is "automate it" a good response here? Also, what automation would you propose that handles these changes without introducing its own update requirements? If it's a macro tool separate from the application, the macro targets may well have changed, had additional parameters added or removed, etc. You'll have to run through them all to ensure they still work, with test cases ready ahead of time, or else you've lost just as much time. And if it's automation in the program itself, like a scripting language, said automation may just as easily be broken or removed by the updates.