Manual checklists are often the best option for repeated tasks that can't be automated sufficiently reliably and sufficiently economically. But if they can be, then manual checklists are unnecessarily inefficent and/or unreliable. And the more frequently repeated the task is (ceteris paribus), the more up-front energy is justified in automating it. That said, to automate a process, you have to understand it enough to generate a checklist as a prerequisite (and, sure, you can develop that understanding in the course of automation, but doing so first will also go a long way to informing you if automation is likely to be worthwhile.)

That said, and without prejudice to SQLite’s use of checklists which I haven’t deeply considered, while the conditions that make checklists the best choice are definitely present in aviation and surgery in obvious ways, processes around software tend to lend themselves to efficient and reliable automation, with non-transitory reliance on checklists very often a process smell that, while not necessarily wrong, merits skepticism and inquiry.

Yeah, checklists are great. Further, they're even precursors to automation.