Yeah, the manual fixing part might be required for a while. For some applications like in film, NERF methods are looking interesting where the topology doesn't need to be perfect for hard surfaces. The new Corridor Digital video showed how fast that is progressing with a quick look at some applications of it so far.

It's not hard to imagine as graph neural networks become more advanced, and with enough training data, that a topology solver will exist. Even as an assistant tool rapidly fixing common issue. (These kind of force multipliers are important since they allow one artist to work at the pace of multiple). Another method is to start from an artistically created reference mesh (or something like MetaHuman) and mapping scans to it to import actors.

You mention using AR. A lot of comments view mainstream AR and its data collection ability to be a tipping point where various techniques become commonplace. Walking around with a headset and scanning the world at extremely fine detail with algorithms extracting objects and other algorithms extracting normal maps, lighting data, etc. In many game pipelines artists will (or did before large databases of assets) go out and collect photogrammetry scans with teams. This process will be much cheaper and faster later.

It's also interesting from a rendering perspective how some tools are dealing with larger polycount objects. (Other than simply simplifying them and baking normal maps). UE5 for instance can handle very unoptimized meshes with millions of polygons. Not super ideal and not viable for VR applications anytime soon, but engine pipelines might be able to magically handle things that artists used to do manually to increase performance.