I Wrote 800 Cypress Tests. Then Playwright Came Out. Here's the Honest Story. The first Cypress test I ever wrote was a login flow for a SaaS dashboard sometime in late 2019. I had spent the previous week wrestling with Selenium and a flaky Chromedriver, and a colleague kept telling me to "just try Cypress, it's different." I installed it, ran npx cypress open , and a window popped up showing my actual application running next to a list of commands, and I could click any command in the sidebar and watch the DOM rewind to that exact moment. I think I said "oh" out loud. The kind of "oh" that means a tool just made a problem you'd been brute-forcing for years go away. For the next four years, Cypress was the tool. Not "a tool we considered" the tool. We had eight hundred tests. We had a Cypress Cloud subscription. We had custom commands for everything. We had a wiki page called "How to debug a flaky Cypress test" that was longer than most onboarding documents. I gave talks about Cypress at meetups.…