This is a great article, and I largely agree but I feel like we're giving ourselves an excuse to be lazy. Because I've absolutely seen this principle swing in the opposite direction, where someone writes slop code, without ever having had a real conversation with the end user(s) and consequently the software goes out the door without having considered top 5 most common edge cases that would have been so obvious if a little more effort had been put in.

I think I needed this right now, thank you.

Page Object Models trade off clarity for encapsulation. Concrete example [1]. They can make tests look "cleaner" but often obscure what's actually happening. For example:

    await page.getStarted(); // what does this actually do?

vs

    await page.locator('a', { hasText: 'Get started' }).first().click();
    await expect(page.locator('h1', { hasText: 'Installation' })).toBeVisible();

The second version is explicit and self-documenting. Tests don't always benefit from aggressive DRY, but I've seen teams adopt POMs to coordinate between SDETs and SWEs.

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1: https://playwright.dev/docs/pom