True story: I took over for a developer working on a large and complex multi-step form. I wasn't surprised that there were a few little bugs in it, but I noticed that the number and severity of the bugs increased as you went through the form. The first step was pretty much bug free, but the final step was completely broken.

Many people who claim that test automation is "too much overhead" either don't understand what test automation is or don't understand what overhead is. If you have to test everything in order to change anything you either have a huge manual testing overhead or have a huge quality liability.