The way I look at Auto-voting on Hive is that is has way more positives than negatives and without it, Hive would likely spiral down way more.

To start, in order to be able to actually use Auto-Voting in a meaningful way, your vote actually needs to be worth something so it only is available for those who are invested in the platform. The reality also is that most people simply don't have time to each day browe Hive to check a bunch of posts most of the time having to plow through a bunch of garbage and manually do at least 10 Upvotes. Auto-Upvotes kind of work in a way like Patreon. If you generally like the content someone puts out and you see the wallet activity is healthy for the Hive Ecosystem, it's very fair to just put in an Auto-vote. As a creator it's also motivating and encouraging to know that your post will get at least a certain post payout without the need to often get lucky to be picked up by one of the curation projects or the occasional whale vote. Nothing worse than putting a ton of effort in just to see it getting only a couple votes and this happens quite often I would say on Hive.

The main downside I would say is that it brings about the danger of lazy content which is made only to capitulize on the auto-upvotes. It also doesn't really help content discovery or putting what's the best in trending.

Personally I have a list of accounts that are on auto-upvote who all either need to bring content that I enjoy, be good for the Hive ecosystem, support me. This while each day I do some manual curation (often upvoting comments & engagement that my posts get) to make sure my Voting Power stays below 100%. It's a good mix of auto & manual curation while it keeps the time requirement down.