The thing is, "who'll stand up for people like me and my values" is the only rational way to vote. We don't know whether most policy will work. *And* we don't know what snap decisions the government will be called on to make about unpredictable events.
Very strange technocrat brained modern phenomenon, the idea that we should weigh an itemised list of policies from manifestoes on their objective merits.
I'm a smart person, I think, and I vote on values. Though ofc I read manifestoes, but mostly to discern values, red lines, priorities, commitments etc, not for the policy itself which some over caffienated 32 year olds called up some think tanks and threw together