Thanks for the detailed response.

The Playwright dev team would probably say that you should avoid using IDs as selectors and instead favour the use of selectors based on user-visible aspects, e.g. "a link including the text 'cat'" or "a button with the label 'register now'". That way your tests are immune to under-the-hood changes the user is oblivious to. The range of selector options (locators in their world) are a real strength of Playwright.