"To succeed without even trying" is a figure of speech. It's hard to take it literally, given that success implies an attempt, and "attempting" and "trying" are pretty close to synonyms.
I disagree (perhaps obviously), in that the way I see it achieving success doesn't need an overt attempt. One can in fact succeed without trying (or attempting; I agree they're synonymous), and probably does so a thousand times a day without even realizing it.
But in any event, we are talking about a particular activity: the play of a game.
You seem to be conflating stuff in the fiction - does the PC recognise a bird or a banana - with stuff at the table - does the player succeed in their action.
Given that one is in theory intended to reflect the other, IMO that conflation is valid.
That, and while you see it as the player succeeding, all the player and GM have done is successfully spoken some words and (most likely) understood what each other is saying. In the fiction is where success or failure occurs, and that in-the-fiction perspective is the one I care about.
In having raised this notion of the GM declaring that a player auto-succeeds before the player even gets to declare an action, I am talking about the play of the game. What happens at the table.
If the GM decides to tell the player something before the player had even made a move or declared an action, that is not the player auto-succeeding.
No, it's the character auto-succeeding.
If, when a character looks into a room, I mention among other things that there's an over-ripe banana on the table, that implies a number of trivial-scale auto-successes on the character's part:
--- she noticed the banana
--- she recognized it as a banana
--- she knows enough about bananas to tell when one is over-ripe
This all happens without her player having to waste time telling me "I look for bananas and check the ripeness of any I find" as part of the "I look into the room" declaration, and also happens without my having to get the player to determine the character's knowledge of bananas.
Now this might be different if, say, the PC is from a culture and-or part of the game world where bananas are nigh unheard-of; in that case I'd narrate the colour-size-shape of it and then get the player to roll to determine whether the PC in fact knows what it is and-or what it is for. No real stakes to the roll, though; it's purely informative.