Much of the pain can be reduced by considering if you should bother automating the thing in the first place. Some kinds of automation are absolutely essential.

Much of the pain can be reduced by considering if you should bother automating the thing in the first place. Some kinds of automation are absolutely essential. Aligning wafer stages during photolithography, shipping logistics, high frequency trading, etc. The business absolutely wouldn't work without it. The other kinds of automation are more questionable. Developing E2E CI/CD automation for an internal tool that is redeployed once every quarter might be a more difficult sell to management. For these cases, even if the rate of manual process invocation is somewhat high (i.e. frustrating for some employees), the customer can't see it. They won't pay one additional cent for this. There is also this entire meta time wasting game where the mere debate about "should we automate" takes up so much resources you could have manually invoked the thing more times than it would ever be feasibly invoked automatically during its projected lifetime. Alternatively, you could have just let your developers build the damn thing to get it out of their systems.