Auto-Pack packs edited images as internal PNG
With Automatically Pack Into .Blend turned on, one would reasonably assume that Blender automatically saves images into the .Blend.

While it does technically pack images, any texture painting progress is still lost after saving. Since Pack Image does not work for edited images anyway,
it would make a lot of sense to pack edited images from disk as an internal PNG when saving while Auto-Pack is on.
1 Comment
There's likely a technical reason that makes this non-trivial to implement (either that or there's a desire not to let users unwittingly bloat their .blend files). But I agree, it sure would be nice not to lose that data.