I just don't trust it

Manual saves are often a lot more stable than automatic saves.
- When you think about it, every save is manual one, like in order to use "automatic" save, you have to actually launch the game and play it
  
  no

Fun fact: pretty much all exit-saves in Bethesda games (Skyrim, Fallout, etc.) are not necessarily complete in their Data. There are actual cases where these can be easily corrupted and won't work on a reload or even introduce long time save corruption if you use them. Don't ever trust an exit-save in those games! (Source: me fooling around with the save system too much)
- quick save is also pretty fucked in their games. highly recommend getting a mod that replaces the quicksave keybind with something that creates a manual save with an autogenerated name. (that is not how bethesda implements quicksave, for some reason.)

Save. Save save. Savesavesavesavesavesavesavesavesavesavesavesavesavesavesavesave. Exit. Are you sure?

staring at save screen
Wait, did I just save, or do I still need to save?
zones out while processing save again

Save game twice, but then don't actually exit game just in case it didn't actually save

DayZ master race. No saving available.
- Didn't it have some combat logging thing
  
  There's a 15 second delay for logging out but yeah, you can log out mid-firefight and many people do. However the point was that when you die you don't get to try again from last save - you start again from zero.

Can't relate, I've always just save and exited if it offers that.
- Out of curiosity about how old are you? Back in my day sometimes saving just didn't work which is where I built up the habit of saving a couple times. For really important saves using two slots was best just in case one spontaneously corrupted as well
  
  Let's just say that I don't think that's it. I think I've just been lucky and also saving often enough that going back one save isn't a concern