Sure for me QA consists into two parts.
1- Automation:
Should cover the main flows of our system which gives us the trust to deploy new features, when I worked on a project without automation I end up having a fat system full of bugs with automation u are at least sure your main flows are working correctly.
2- Manual:
I believe manual testing purpose is to find corner cases then include them into automation testing.
For QA engineers most of the time they are doing manual testing at the end of each sprint then sign the release.