After countless hours of research and try and error, here is my outcome for those interested into the same topic:
Let's first define "automation":
Hereby I mean that program code (a script) emulates user actions with the application.
The objective is to free the user from repetitive, boring tasks. This could be for example, data exports on a scheduled basis which are then further analyzed.
What I am not talking about is:
Test automation.
automation of industrial processes.
With this out of the way, I can summarize:
Web applications have an automation API based upon the W3C specification of web driver
Windows applications have an automation API called UIA3. It supports Win32, Windows Form, WPF.
A Qt application running on Windows cannot benefit from Window's automation API. The underlying libraries of course cannot reference and interact with QML/QQuick objects.
If you have a Qt-programmed application that you did not program yourself, there is no way to emulate user interactions!
There is no API that allows you to address the GUI elements programmatically. The Accessibility API requires that the developers would have invested their time to provide means to connect with accessibility applications. This is very often not the case for obvious reasons.
In the QT world the rule applies : No access to the source code, no way to automate !
Squish and Ranorex are commercial tools made for test automation. In theory they could be converted to emulate user interaction with the 3rd party application.
However, for non-commercial automation projects the following reasons speak against this only possible workaround:
the considerable license costs of Squish and Ranorex
extreme overhead installing these tools
necessity to have a separate package for each Qt version, i.e. if you would like to automate an application A coded in qt 6.2 you need to install another package than for a qt application coded in version 6.4. You get it.