Exactly this. The combination of selling a modeling strategy to higher ups, customizing a model for super weird deployment or resource limitations that exist for political or historical reasons, and all your standard trade-offs vs feature engineering and model selection just means that AutoML (and similar tools) has very little applicability in most product companies.

If you work in Google & you can remove the political blockers & guarantee the model’s space of deployed resources is parametrizable with a clean set of parameters that AutoML can consider as part of the optimization, then by all means use it.

That’s just decades away from being viable at any given product company.