A few other things which are easy to miss manually: identify when you have model changes which are not reflected in the migrations, ensure that the migrations always run, and fail loudly if someone tries to run migrations which started at the same point but haven’t been explicitly merged (which is really handy switching branches or on fast-moving projects with multiple features in-flight simultaneously).
None of this is magic which you can’t do by hand but there’s a substantial benefit in being able to rely on it always happening and not having to spend any time thinking about it in most cases.
None of this is magic which you can’t do by hand but there’s a substantial benefit in being able to rely on it always happening and not having to spend any time thinking about it in most cases.