"Human-in-the-loop" gets used in two ways. The marketing way: "we have approval workflows somewhere." The real way: every operating decision the system surfaces has a human who can accept, modify, or reject it before anything happens to a live product.
For studios running live games and apps with paying users, autonomous is a luxury you earn, not a default you ship. The cost of an AI making one wrong move on a Game 3 monetization curve is bigger than the cost of an extra 30 seconds of operator review.
Qualia is human-in-the-loop because the alternative, autonomous-by-default, has not yet earned the trust of operators we respect.