Do auto-attacks serve any meaningful purpose?

[vetch]

Do auto-attacks serve any meaningful purpose?

The current design of FF14's combat means that players are constantly doing basic bread-and-butter manual attacks even when they aren't doing big cool attacks...so also doing basic attacks that are automated seems redundant.

But that's just me; curious if others may have insights that I'm missing.

It's something to min-max when you get dumped into 1-60 content as a caster or healer. 1-60 gameplay is already sparse enough that I wouldn't be happy if yet another thing were removed from it.