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The auto battle feature is actually really useful in some situations. In these games, all Pokémon drop species specific items that you can use to make money or TMs, and auto battle can help you rake these in quickly. It is also useful for fighting "mass outbreaks" when looking for shiny Pokémon. Mass outbreaks are a daily event where certain species will have a super high spawn rate. These will eventually fade away after a certain number of individuals are defeated in battle. These outbreaks also have a somewhat higher chance of spawning a shiny Pokémon and this chance increases gradually as you defeat a certain number of individuals. The outbreaks spawn around 100-120 individuals, and defeating all of them can get quite tedious and time consuming without auto battle. The nice thing about using auto battle to shiny hunt is that your partner Pokémon will refuse to automatically battle a shiny Pokémon, which is a life saver if you care about shinies (this actually happened to me just recently when I failed to notice that a shiny Pokémon had spawned). Ironically, the thing everyone expected the feature to be useful for, grinding for XP, is actually a very ineffective use for the feature. You get a rather massive penalty to XP gain (around 90% penalty, I think) while defeating Pokémon with this feature. If you want to grind for XP, it is probably faster to do so the old fashioned way.
Regardless of all this, if you don't like the auto battle feature, you can simply just not use it at all. You still have the option to have your partner follow you and pick up items for you without fighting any wild Pokémon, as these two modes are activated by different buttons.
