I think one key aspect is lost here. A thing automation does is compartmentalise, abstract and remove the need for in-depth understanding by/for everyone involved.

It's the reason why container images are the latest form of packaging for certain types of applications: it streamlines the interfaces towards applications even more. Configuration is usually done with environment variables, or even abstracted further with something like helm charts to deploy on an even more abstracted platform like Kubernetes.

Things like configuration, temporary and persistent/temporary storage, health checks, services/ports, ... are all presented with a unified interface.