It's built by the founders of Puppeteer which came out of the Chrome team. Some things I like about it:
1. It's reliable and implements auto-waiting as described in the article. You can use modern async/await syntax and it ensures elements are a) attached to the DOM, visible, stable (not animating), can receive events, and are enabled: https://playwright.dev/docs/actionability
2. It's fast — It creates multiple processes and runs tests in parallel, unlike e.g. Cypress.
3. It's cross-browser — supports Chrome, Safari, and Firefox out-of-the-box.
4. The tracing tools are incredible, you can step through the entire test execution and get a live DOM that you can inspect with your browser's existing developer tools, see all console.logs, etc...
5. The developers and community are incredibly responsive. This is one of the biggest ones — issues are quickly responded to and addressed often by the founders, pull requests are welcomed and Slack is highly active and respectful.
My prior experience with end-to-end tests was that they were highly buggy and unreliable and so Playwright was a welcome surprise and inspired me to fully test all the variations of our checkout flow.