Plus, I am an automation engineer. If I'm working, something is either new or wrong.

I once got severely penalized and basically fired for this. Pure engineering role. I figured a good supervisor didn't need me to tell them for them how well and what I did for the past year so I was pretty laissez-faire in my own written review. Well I was basically almost instantly fired. For the next three months they kept trying to stage "gotchas" and each time they just found out that I was a beyond excellent engineer and the trust was completely blown out on their side not mine.

The relationship was pretty destroyed but I'm a pretty 'all's well that is well' guy and I'm also a professional. However they could never forgive themselves for the damage they did. So they spent the next 2 years doing "constructive" dismal. By the time they were done I found out there is actually something beyond your soul that you can hate something with. Then they let me go with a company wide sweep of like 10% of the department at once with severance because obviously despite like 6 major staged attempts in the final 3 months, they couldn't pin fault on me at all.

You would think that, but ultimately, HR has the last say. Managers like numbers, and HR just wants any excuse to can you.