I just drove 2500 miles over a week and a half with nothing fancier than cruise control in terms of automation - though I will admit, it's the fancy cruise control where I can tick the set speed up or down with a lever, instead of having to rely on the old coast/accel/set controls (I've got one of those too, and it's a bit more hassle than it's worth in a lot of conditions). Most of those miles were on the sort of two lane state highways that apparently are exceedingly prone to phantom braking events on current gen Tesla hardware, and I had... ah, yes, zero of them. Same goes for weird failures to hold lane, or anything else. I was in the loop, and didn't have to monitor automation that was going to be fine 99.9% of the time and try to kill me the rest. Going through Salt Lake during the edge of rush hour, "randomly standing on the brakes with no warning" would have meant someone was in the back seat with my kids after having totaled the car. I'm sorry, "random braking events" are simply not OK on anything resembling a regular basis, and at least some people, in some conditions that resemble what I drive, are reporting them very regularly.

But to your main point, I honestly don't know what a difference Autopilot makes. I've dorked around with an older version for half an hour, and it drove like an autistic student driver. "This is the center of my lane and I will be in the center of it, because this is the center of my lane." "What about the trailer over there, not really parked entirely off the road?" "This is the center of my lane..." etc. It was quite frankly terrifying to see, because it had no awareness of anything resembling the environment around it except the lane lines. I have no doubt it would have clipped the trailer (parked... oh, a foot into the lane, because the shoulder wasn't wide enough for the rest of it) had I not taken over, and at that point, I may as well drive it myself. As I've suggested to various people over the years, let me know when Autopilot can handle a sprayer coming down a two lane highway, and reasonably figure out what to do about a cow in the road, and I'll pay attention. Right now, it seems alarmingly unable to reliably figure out that the road is clear with anything resembling a useful level of accuracy.

However, the point remains: I've chosen not to spend the money on that, which means I don't have to worry about spending money on it down the road. The Hedonic treadmill is very much a thing, and so by deliberately not adjusting my standards higher, I can live on less money going forward. I pity the people I know who have huge salaries for a while and buy $200k luxury cars, because I've seen, in a somewhat close friend, exactly what happens when those salaries aren't a thing anymore for one reason or another. The end result is prolonged pain and bankruptcy, because after you've driven a 700hp German luxury saloon, going back to something cheaper and slower (and more affordable) is really hard. I've enjoyed driving those briefly, but I've never owned one, so that my car is a bit of a gutless wonder cresting mountain passes at 8k ft, well... so it is. I can hold highway speed, I just can't run in massive excess of it. Oh well. Stupid-cheap to run for everything else, low maintenance, no complaints.

I could come up with justifications for spending all sorts of money, if I really wanted to - and my point is that the ability and willingness to not do that is a very useful skill. Humans are great post-hoc justification machines. Always have been, always will be. And knowing that, working around it, etc, reduces an awful lot of stress in life.

You claim a car that will more or less stay in a lane is worth $100k. Well, OK... I spent not an awful lot more than that on a house and have been slowly upgrading the property over the years as we have money. Though I might have to drop a chunk of change into some appliances here soon, the service life of modern appliances seems to be about 5 years before major surgery, if you can get the parts.

I lived for a while in Seattle, and heard people go on and on about how amazing Autopilot was. I just rode an ebike in the rain, and spent the savings on good rain gear. One cost $100k. One cost... oh, I think that was a $1500 build, it was a nice commuter build. I think I got the better deal.