For a long time, my station consisted of an IC-7000.
That was replaced (as base station) by an IC-7600 when funds became available.
This has proven to be a very good radio (at least for my purposes).
For the lower bands (80m), especially on winter evenings the 100W maximum output can be a bit limiting. An amplifier improves that problem. "Improves", because that is all it does. Power can help overcome noise but it can't fix poor propagation.
To beef up the signal a bit on noisy bands, I turn on the amplifier.
I use an AL-80B, which uses a 3-500Z tube. A bit old-school, but a (relatively)
cheap and proven technology. It works very well. A lot depends upon the tube
but with a good one, it has no problem delivering 1kW on the maximum "spikes"
of SSB.
One of the auto-tuning solid-state amplifiers might be nice, but in reality those extra few thousand dollars only really buy you 30 seconds of warm-up time plus a few more seconds to manually tune.
One discovery that I did make is that if you want to get the best out of these amplifiers, you really need a proper 240v supply. At the higher power levels a typical 115v supply just doesn't cut it.
I initially used a manual ATU (from Palstar). It worked well enough, but it was
the slowest part of getting set up on a different frequency (even a slightly
different one). The HF-AUTO from Palstar works well. It is not as fast as the
smaller, lower power versions (e.g. MFJ), because they just have to flip the
appropriate series of relays. This has to crank a slider on a coil and move
a variable capacitor. The price you pay for handling higher power.