It mostly stops honest mistakes, because those do happen, especially when the <prompting> might not have been perfect either.

You do have a bit of a point, though: I’ve run several models in sandboxes with --dangerously-skip-permissions for months; in the full expectation that I'd need to replace a sandbox once in a while. But so far none of the sandboxes have trashed themselves, yet. knock on wood

Auto mode seems like a lighter-weight version of that: fewer local resources, and it can run on the metal if you need cc to help with system work.