It’s possible (and indeed uh ... recommended) to write frontend tests that are resilient to DOM changes by not depending on things that are not essential to the functionality being tested. Eg select a form field by its label, not by its position in the DOM, and use specific data attributes if there’s no better choice. Then when you gut the HTML for UI overhaul, if the functionality hasn’t changed, the cypress test doesn’t change, you just make sure you attach the attributes to the right new elements.

Of course if the functionality changed (like you split something up into 2 pages) yeah you need to update your UI tests cause you are testing a different experience now. But they are UI tests, so yeah. That’s appropriate.

I dunno. It sounds like you found other parts of it unwieldy as well, but the idea that the tests are inherently brittle is wrong. Time spent maintaining UI based testing is saved many times over when compared with the manual clicking around that it saves imo.