different strokes for different folks. Auto-hiding = super frustrating everytime it pops up when I didn't want it where as with it always there there's zero frustration. Zero frustration wins over some wasted space for me.

Yeah, many years ago, I used to move the dock to the left and auto-hide it to recover the screen space. But it resulted in the dock popping up (sliding right) at unexpected times and I ended up clicking the dock items unintentionally.

So, after about a year or so, I defaulted to moving the dock to the left but stopped auto-hiding it.