At certain points in my career, I worked as a „manual tester“: I executed test cases step by step, manually, in the GUI. I compared what happened in the GUI to the expected values in the test documentation.

The customers paid for it, but it wasn‘t fulfilling work. Even when I had written the test documentation myself.

With some effort, most of the tests could have been automated.
Still, I think there is a place for manual testing, e.g. exploratory testing.

What are your thoughts and experiences?