It depends.

The color of the light shining on the subject is always changing. The color of the subject also influences the light that the camera sees. Auto WB tries to guess what that all means but it may not be what you want.

In the camera, WB affects only the JPEG image so if you are going to edit the image on the computer you may end up changing it anyhow.

Your own eyesight will fool you and you can't really judge colors at the scene because your eye-brain combines to do its own version of white balance.

So I just leave the WB set to Daylight (unless I am shooting indoors under incandescent lighting). This way the color of the light or the subject does not mess with the result. Broad daylight looks natural, sunsets look warm and red and cloudy or rainy days look bluish like they actually are. The camera records all of these scenes objectively.

I copy the raw file to the computer and work with it. I may also hang on the the JPEG from the camera just for reference but that's not my primary source.

Modern digital cameras have a plethora of adjustment features that I expect a lot of people do not use much, or even at all. I would hazard a guess that they are included because they are simple software adjustments that can be touted as selling features. But in my case I found them to be a liability that accidentally -- and negatively -- affected a lot of my photos.

I was on a trip to Iceland in November when the weather was quite cold, windy and rainy. I often stepped out of the car holding my camera under my coat for protection against the elements. I was also wearing gloves, so my sense of touch was compromised. Had I left the camera on full AUTO I would not have been able to change certain settings, but I often shoot in Aperture Priority or Program modes where the user is in control of many adjustments. And adjust I did...

On my camera (Sony A57) the White Balance control is the right side of the four-way controller. It turns out my gloved thumb was hitting this button while I was holding the camera under my coat, thereby activating the WB adjustment; and further accidental presses of the four-way controller changed the settings to all manner of different values for colour temperature, A-G, and G-M colour balance. I noticed the odd colours in the viewfinder and LCD screen, but did not clue in as to what was going on because my EVF and LCD displays are usually configured for a clutter-free view of the image. I really thought something had gone seriously wrong in the camera. Yes, there are view/display options that give a lot more detail about the camera settings and that would have shown me the actual settings being applied, but I find these info-rich displays distracting for the most part. Luckily I am able to recover the photos in PP, but it required tabulating the WB settings for each image to determine which had been affected (some adjustments were small). More than 200 of 1100 photos were "off" to varying degrees.

So I guess one point of this thread is to let off steam and express my frustration with some of the "useful features" and ergonomic design aspects of my camera. Are these fine tunings of colour balance really useful, given the capabilities of PP? Do folks actually take the time to adjust these settings before a shoot?

A second point -- and probably the main point -- is to vent my anger with myself for not understanding my camera better and for not being more familiar with its capabilities AND information displays. I now know that there are EVF and LCD display settings that provide virtually ALL of the shooting parameters of the camera, and maybe I just need to get more comfortable with using them at the appropriate times. I will probably continue to shoot with the minimal EVF/LCD info overlays, but I now know how to quickly determine why a photo might not look quite right.

Thanks for listening... I feel better now.

Sounds like a Sony problem.
I used to have problems accidentally turning the top selection knob on my Canon 20D, but it has been redesigned and I don’t recall problems with any other cameras I have used.
The 20D is from about 2004 so that design was a long time ago.
The newest Canon bodies are almost fool proof and the modes in them seem pretty relevant to the likely targeted experience level of the users of certain level bodies.
I use a lot of modes and a lot of the camera, depending on the shooting situations.
No complaints!!!
SS