Automating things, even when it doesn't save time, is how you learn the skills to automate the things that will.

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The post argues against the mindset that tasks should only be automated if it saves time immediately. It emphasizes that automating even simple tasks can develop skills and confidence, which are beneficial for automating more complex tasks in the future. Building an engineering culture that values automation can lead to greater efficiency and innovation over time.

XKCD's "Is It Worth the Time?" Considered Harmful

I think this is just an example of the exploration-exploitation tradeoff - unnecessary automation can be a great way to explore new tools, but if your aim is to get something done, then maybe estimate which way is faster

Am I the only one having trouble reading that table?

The article would benefit from more succinctly providing its thesis statement: automating processes can provide benefits outside recovering the time that was spent manually carrying out those processes; those benefits should be considered when deciding whether to automate a process or not.
That said, the results of such consideration can still be: no, it’s not worth automating this thing at this time.

We had some mundane task we need to do once every quarter and we kept saying “it’s only four times per year” until we once totally forgot about it and resulted in an incident which made us look bad.
Automate your boring tasks people.

On top of that, the work to automate a short task is sometimes worth it just for the peace of mind of not having to think about it anymore.