Well I mean if they are doing an autobattle in the background there is still a certain skill in knowing what the AI will/won't mess up
Not necessarily a very entertaining one though.
There's also the question if they'll show your targets defense before you attack or not. Much more gambling if not since you can't compensate for poor AI against every defense. Selecting an army to pick on a specific AI defense though is much more doable as you can send the right amount of rogues, the right units for turn ordering, etc. Without that it's probably "8 highest initiative (or range for ages where the high initiative units can't reach the enemy on turn 1) for the age units, go! Hope you win guys!"
Then there's the fact that the vast majority of the population isn't "ready" for it to start - defense didn't matter if you collect on time, now apparently it does at least a little.
Will the rewards be worthy of hype for people to go through the work to seriously compete in it? Or will it be a joke that most people ignore apart from a few who were already ready for it?