How do you feel about time tracking? ⏱

Hey all, I'm considering building an MVP around time tracking, and am worried about my own pre-conceptions. Feel free to answer as little or as many of the following questions. I would really 🙏 appreciate any insights you folks have 🙇‍♂️.

Short-form

1. Are you expected to log time in your day job?
   1.1) If yes do you use specialized software for it? (exel would be an example of not specialized)
2. How do you feel about tracking your time? (on a scale from 1 to 10, 10 is positive)
3. Do you now, or have you tracked your non-day-job time in the past, for personal insights?
4. Would you prefer software that has timers you start and stop or otherwise manually control, or something that actively tracks your activity?

Long-form

a) What tools do you use to log time? and what are the best and worst parts of using these tools?
b) What's the process of assigning time to projects, tickets, clients etc? is there any automation here?
c) if yes to 3) what was/is your motivation for doing so?
d) Any other insights? Please feel free to also share generally about your situation around logging time. Logging time for clients? Internal team tracking the progress of a project?

My own thoughts

I'm personally not a huge fan of logging time. I think for companies developing their own product, forcing developers to log time can be a short-sighted move that sacrifices employee autonomy (or sense of) in favor of managers' sense of visibility*. How-ever there are obviously cases where it's necessary i.e. billable time for clients.
I also don't like logging time in the sense of I don't enjoy doing it, so I personally would be open to using software that tracks my time for me, as long as I still have full control over the logs. i.e. managers can't see the time until I've reviewed and adjusted it myself. Maybe something like this would also be useful to me personally too, for side-projects.
The situation I find myself in is where I've been asked to log time on my work, not for internal use, but because we'll need it in the case of a tax audit. This situation is what got me thinking about time, but it also seems pretty unique to me so I'm worried it's biasing my thoughts on the topic.

Side note, this post ☝️ is me trying to start a project with some kind of market research, instead of starting with code 😉.

*I say 'sense of visibility' because I think time can be one of those metrics that becomes less useful once you start tracking it, think "tracking lines of code written", not a good idea.