We do things by hand — why does automating it feel so huge?

You know the manual way. It works, mostly. Automation sits off to the side as a vague, enormous project nobody has time to start. So the manual work continues, and the dread of "we should really automate this" grows quietly in the background. Here is the honest part: you are not overwhelmed by automation. You are overwhelmed by imagining the whole system at once — every script, every edge case, every tool you haven't learned. That picture is not real work. It is a story you are telling yourselves instead of working. No team automates everything at once. They automate one task, then another. The teams who seem fluent in automation simply started smaller than you imagine, and kept going. That choice is open to your pod right now.