My first thought was "Does it matter?".
My second thought was, "Maybe it matters for doing creative thought, which presumably can't be done on autopilot".
Is there a difference between pre-committing and going on autopilot?
I sometimes think "I shouldn't deplete myself by doing unpleasant things that don't matter a lot - I should save my willpower for the really important things." Apparently this may get less true as I age, so I should push myself sometimes to find out how much ego depletion is really happening.
Age Shall Not Weary Us: Deleterious Effects of Self-Regulation Depletion Are Specific to Younger Adults
Brain areas associated with self-regulation don't mature until the mid-twenties. And apparently, if you compare older and younger people in a standard set-up for detecting ego-depletion, older people are not affected. WEIRD, indeed.
In 2010, there was a study indicating that ego depletion doesn't affect people who don't expect it to (and that one was run on college students). I wonder if part of the effect might be coming from differences in attitudes about effort between older and younger people.