I build robotic cells, specifically industrial manufacturing automation. They are definitely designed for the main workflow; they handle the most common exceptions gracefully but when something rare happens they just throw a fault back to the operator.
The response from users (operators, engineers, customers) is overwhelmingly positive. Quality of parts increases, quantity of parts increases, cost of operations decrease, quality of life seems to increase for all involved. My mantra is "People are bad at being robots. Robots are bad at being people."
Just yesterday, I worked on a cell that's automated the placing of small seals in a plastic assembly. For the past 8 years, for 12 shifts per week, there's been a person sitting at a dial table that indexes every 2.5 seconds. They were responsible for placing a tiny part in a magazine with a buffer of about 20 parts, a really fast operator could work ahead and have 30 seconds to stand up and shake their wrists out or take a drink, and then sit back down to place parts. Now, a robot pours the seals out and picks them up automatically; there's still an operator around monitoring stuff like the amount of talc powder on the seals, the quantity of parts in all the hoppers, running pressure tests every couple thousand parts, adjusting speeds and pressures of the multitude of actuators, and generally optimizing the cell. They can use their human analytical and decision-making work because they're not tied down clumsily using their fingers to grab a seal every 2.5 seconds; the robot does that mechanical function without complaint. The robot cannot refill hoppers, it cannot sense when new parts are contaminated with moisture that won't feed through the machine, or when a nipper is getting dull; outfitting it with sensors and algorithms to attempt those more complex processes would not be a productive endeavor.
People use tools because tools are useful. Scope and adjustability are critical; when a tool takes over the entire process and gets in the way, that's a bad thing, but a good tool is far better than no tool at all.