I think you mean automation is very useful. I've worked in a lot of places where we had a single `make deploy` that could compile, test, upload the artifacts, deploy the artifacts to hosts, start the new services, and slowly transition the load balancer to point at the new instances while automatically backing out if error metrics started lighting up. This is just automation, it doesn't have to happen on every commit. Especially when working solo or on a small team, I might not want to maintain a lot of VCS branches and instead, just deploy when I feel it's ready. You have to do all of that stuff anyway, so if you later decide to hook it up to a VCS trigger, you're all set.
I guess that's fair, I'm probably coming into this having only seen it done a certain way and blind to other possibilities.
That being said, it would take a lot to convince me a standard CI/CD pipeline is not worth the investment. My only experience with non CI/CD deployment process was a very manual process at a startup, then when I saw my first CI/CD it felt like magic.
A good old makefile is a CI/CD pipeline. All the new fangled tools are re-inventing a lot of capabilities make already has. I blame the new kids on the block who have only ever known Windows :-)
