Indeed - automated tests introduce more friction because they are hard to maintain and to write.

So really, the best thing to do would be to make it easier to write and update automated tests.

Recording clicks is of course one way, but the tests are probably more brittle for it.

If you have access to the source templates, you could probably right up some kind of rudimentary compile time type checking and validation of selectors, so you could know when a new feature breaks something.

The best would probably be some seamless mixture of the two - record tests in terms of the templates, with the ability to detect breaking Ng template changes...