Sorry if it comes out robotic, since I don’t use stow myself I just opened the manual and parsed it for you.
You manually create the repo of packages ONCE and then use stow to deploy them without having to link stuff manually every time.
As for “what’s it doing for me”, stow is just a generic deployment script that somebody else has written for you. You can just as well create your own and do it your way.
I personally used to have a bash script with one custom function “symlink” that error checked the linking process and a list of target/destination under the function.
Now I’m trying to code a python script similar to stow that works with packages of configs but instead of recreating paths inside the package you just provide a json file with target/destination for each file in the package.
Both of my ways have same shortcoming as stow: you have to do some manual work before the script can kick in.