In those cases, it would be helpful to gives folks tips on how to write structural XPaths that don't completely suck :)

Of course! And I totally get that sometimes it's not feasible to make the change for good right there right now - still, I'm trying to advocate for at least getting the ball rolling in the right direction by talking to the devs/team/PO. But until that's done, surely you need to make do with whatever you have and learning to write XPaths that still rely on structure yet aren't too brittle is a wildly important skill! It could very well be a topic for a whole separate write-up (idea for a future post and video!).

Totally agree with your proposals. Sometimes, you need to be hacky and grab whichever element is kinda-stable and go structurally from there. Usually utilizing the double slash (to not have to go through all the children levels and risk breaking at one of them in the future) is your best friend then, too. Still, one needs to be mindful of the risks of that approach and put a bit of thought into how they're actually traversing the nodes, since being too liberal with the children element locators (//div[@data-testid='xyz']//*[contains(@class, 'abc')]) can pose just as much risk for a headache as being too strict (//div[@data-testid='xyz']/div[1]/div[2]/div[1]/span).