Agreed, giving it at least stable identifiers to play with makes a huge difference. With some front end generators, that may not be trivial, though I'd think Selenium being a thing (POM does rely heavily on stable unique identifiers, since "nth element past m" xpath queries are way more fragile) has probably made it more of a standard ask.

Dynamically-created UIs are usually the hardest thing to deal with--if they get a different ID every time, record-replay is out the door, and even Selenium is a lot harder.

But personally, with a lot of automation architecture experience, I think you're exaggerating a little re: doesn't work 2 minutes later half the time. But it also depends on whether your app is driving some invisible external resource that makes the timing highly variable, etc. Even then you can usually "harden" the recording by putting in worst-case delays. It's just that then your test takes so long to run you can't CI it either.

It's really situational. What I'm arguing against more than anything is the knee-jerk reaction that it's never appropriate. It's just never enough usually. The fact that we tend to skip over the option entirely in testing is probably a blind spot and a mistake. Devs dabbling in testing as a side task definitely shouldn't ignore the option.