You'd be surprised how dedicated normal people are when they don't know that these simple things can be automated. I remember about 15 years ago when I was a freshman in highschool, and found my sister replacing every space after period on her 40-page thesis with two spaces. I told her of the find/replace all feature, and she was pretty happy. Over the years I've gone through a crazy number of incidents where normal people are spending tens of hours on things that would literally take me less than maybe 30 seconds to do.

That's fair. I actually had a similar experience with our publications team replacing a word across multiple pages on multiple spaces of our wiki. I can hardly imagine not immediately seeking/knowing to try to seek a better solution.