I don't understand, they are still steering the craft, as well as adjusting it's speed. You haven't removed any of the important requirements for driving - being able to steer the vehicle and modify it's velocity. The ability to use a clutch and change gears simply compounds the difficulty of that exercise, it doesn't cause the driver to necessarily engage with the car in a way affects the drivers skill, it may have a higher skill floor, but it doesn't really make for a higher performance ceiling.

A bad driver isn't thwarted by a stick shift. They'll do the bare minimum to keep the car on the road. These drivers are notoriously bad at selecting gears, so they usually solve that issue buying diesel-powered cars with a more forgiving power curve.

That's totally fine and totally fair. Manual cars do take additional skill to operate. My argument is that those skills don't make you a better driver overall. If you were to put a manual and automatic driver in an automatic car, the manual driver won't necessarily be the better driver by virtue of their being able to shift gears.