Your Puppeteer script passes every test on your local machine. You push it to CI, and it fails 30% of the time. You add --no-sandbox to the Docker config, switch between headless modes, bump the wait timeouts. Still flaky. Then the target site detects you're a bot and returns a CAPTCHA wall. You're three npm packages deep in puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth and still getting blocked. Puppeteer does one thing well: it gives you programmatic control over Chrome via the CDP protocol. For taking screenshots, generating PDFs, and running headless Chrome tasks in Node.js, it's clean and fast. Google maintains it. The API is well-documented. But in 2026, the tasks people throw at browser automation have grown past what Puppeteer was designed for. Cross-browser support? Chromium only. Anti-detection? BYO plugins and proxies. Scaling? Each instance eats CPU and RAM. AI-driven adaptation? Not in the architecture. When a site changes its layout, every selector in your code breaks and you're the one fixing it.…