Sure, no real-time algorithm can match what can be done by hand on a single image, but for video editing and real-time rendering, perfect manual tonemapping is

Sure, no real-time algorithm can match what can be done by hand on a single image, but for video editing and real-time rendering, perfect manual tonemapping is expensive or impossible. You go with a flawed tonemapping algorithm, or you don't have any tonemapping at all.