Some, if not all, AutoML solutions will require a minimum amount of data to try certain methods. But you are entirely correct. The last commercial use of AutoM

Some, if not all, AutoML solutions will require a minimum amount of data to try certain methods. But you are entirely correct. The last commercial use of AutoML I saw demoed had very limited data and while the metrics were ok, I could have made just as good predictions using linear regression in Excel or even just a calculator and some basic heuristics. That's not to say AutoML is bad, I have used H2O with success, it only replaces a small part of the Data Science pipeline.