Comment by Slartie

Did you read the originally linked article? It literally talked about ways in which rewards programs are often designed to only hand out top rewards for a very limited part of all transactions, like only for books at certain bookstores. And that these obscure rules in the extreme case can also change over time, so in one month you need to go to store A, in the next month you better visit store B.

So yes, the rewards are "automatic". But what's not "automatic" is you getting the maximum possible reward percentage on your spending. For that, you often need to optimize your spending along the guardrails put up by some random card issuer. Which takes effort and time. I don't know about you, but I've got better uses for my time, so I'd prefer just not having 2-3% of the price of all products I buy to go towards obscure rewards through which I need to claw back some of those 2-3% by gaming the system. If I want to play games, I buy a computer game and play that.