Or she could have done it manually, and spent orders of magnitude more time and energy.

The scarce resource preventing more people from the ideal solution of using a script in your scenario is you. Most people can’t write a script, so their options are slow and “expensive” manual process, or the 100x as efficient AI. The 1000x as efficient script isn’t an option (well, until the model is good enough to know it should obviously just write the script too).