but one should be equally comfortable with and without them
The only way that would be the case, taking "equally" literally, is if one's name is
this.
Of course the workload will be higher if flying manually
Everybody who flies for real knows that.
Tinstaafl is right, and I have had more than a dozen autopilot failures (the famous KFC225) so I know about flying manually (like, most of the way to Greece and back), but what we now have in Europe is a training system which turns out private pilots who are basically useless.
This doesn't matter since nearly all chuck in flying pretty fast anyway (and reportedly this has been the case since long before cockpit automation was invented) but it severely short-changes those people who wanted to learn to fly for real, and who have the budget and the initiative to do something with their piece of paper.