I think this boils down to prototyping vs. development

When prototyping, ditch automation, as you said. It is far easier to collect some .csv files than write the scraping / parsing. You have to have results.

However, when in “development” stage, you already had some results, now you have to make it (1) better, (2) cheaper, and (3) robust. This is when automation comes into play. At some point this crisis will fade away and you will want to track in real-time how it is affecting the stock prices.

Doing things manually can take you only to a certain point, after that you need to be a bit sexier.