I think it's personal. It depends on what your particular problems have been, and whether they were persistent or quickly solved. My E3V2 (Neo) has ABL, but it works best if you manually level the bed, then run the ABL. I've got my E3 pretty well dialed in these days, but I don't run it unless my faster printers are both busy. To me the biggest difference with nicer printers is speed and accuracy without a lot of extra fuss. Even moving up, it sounds like you identified the issue(s) you were having, and could fix it, even though it wasn't as convenient as true ABL.
GsT
GsT