Ease of access has its place and time. When it is truly about ease of access, then I can understand heeding to those suggestions. But, in this case, you are putting ease of acess vs core mechanics of the game, and pretending that it isn’t that important.
Fun isn’t directly tied to ease of access. Though games can be seen as interactive experiences that can extend from highly mechanical gameplay to educational entertainment or even fully immersive experiences, it doesn’t always mean that what makes one game fun is the same as what makes another fun.
In a game like an RTS that takes the classical route of creating artificial barriers and challenges to create fun, it is vital for the game’s sense of purpose. You can argue a lot over what mechanics specifically belong in this grouping, but the case is usually that there are a bundle of them that make up that core set of challenges.
The designers themselves tend to have a set blueprint in mind for where the line is. But, removing these little things that prevent the players from automatically winning is dangerous without foresight. For one won’t know when the “fun” in that gameplay breaks until it does.
If all of this is not clicking, think of a game like Minecraft and compare the regular gameplay to creative mode. Though both can be seen as games where one is more mechanical oriented and about fantasy, the other is almost a playground for your creativity. These are designed distinctions and one should be exceptionally careful not to attempt to blend the two, lest you end up with a mess.
Although I do not think AutoQ is specifically the mechanism that would trigger the slippery slope, I do believe that it does more good than bad in this kind of setting. A game like AOE wants you to focus on more than combat, such as your economy, map control, resources and so on. Keeping track if creating villagers is the bare minimum in this line of thinking.
A very small example of how gameplay feel gets influenced by this, is multiple TCs. AutoQ would remove the rewarding feeling of creating multiple villagers at once. And as a reminder, this is not the reason why I want this to be in the game to begin with. But, rather that, it is one of the first few challenges that creates a disctintion in players.
Ultimately, RTSes are tedious games. The suggestion to prune this, is misunderstanding the genre, or at least, misunderstanding this game that is really attempting at being a second AoE2–which is why we play it.