Apparently this was the 25th craft sent by the Russians to explore the moon, after a gap of 2-3 decades, highlighting how gaps in practice can hamper competency.

I'm wondering how comparable the two timeframes are. How much of it was automated back then vs now?

Probably a similar amount, actually. It's not like the Soviet lunar landers were manually landed; the 3-second speed-of-light delay to Earth meant that only the rovers were operated that way.

Right, I was thinking a little deeper. As in, how much of the actual control modes where automated? Did the craft wait for corrections from mission control on that 3-second delay back then? Did it compute it's own corrections on its own? Today, is more (or even all) of that flight behavior automated such that there's no real opportunity (given the aforementioned 3-second delay) for humans to say "hey this doesn't look right, cancel the maneuver node stand by for further instructions"?

First, it is the first Russian lunar mission. All before were all Soviet missions. Second, it's not 25th even if we count Soviet missions. Because USSR used to assign "Kosmos-<number>" name of all lunar missions that failed to leave Low Earth orbit or even reach it.

A "special moon landing" - this setback is going to mean reduced future funding for their space program.

Not necessarily - India, China, Japan and US have all upped their ante on space exploration and so Russia will too. (And with the US militarising space with its US Space Force, well, ... "Begun, the space war, has ...")

Roscosmos budget is not expected to grow in the coming years. Given the inflation and depreciating ruble, this effectively means lower budget for the coming years. Roscosmos also lost a lit of international cooperation which means it will have to finance its projects fully, further straining the budget.

$421 million budget is chicken feed.

Where did you get that figure from? The article linked to previously ( https://jamestown.org/program/russian-space-spending-for-202... )says the current annual expenditure is $3.7 billion and Russia is planning to invest around 6.6 billion dollars in its GLONASS (global gps) project.

As an indian I am proud that the ISRO - with a current annual budget of around 1.5 billion dollar - succeeded in its moon mission.

Russia has far more pressing issues than another space race - falling exports and spending due to the Ukraine war.

That's rough, I'm sorry to roscosmos.