Every automation plan says a human reviews before it goes out. Almost none of them enforce it.
What finally worked: making the gate a hard refusal. Delivery fails unless a named human approval is recorded against that specific job. Not a checklist someone can skip. A condition the code checks.
Once the gate is in the code, you can automate everything on either side of it aggressively, because the one irreversible step can't happen by accident.
Documented process rots. Enforced process doesn't.
Where's your human gate - written down, or actually enforced?