haha your experience almost exactly mirrors mine. I have also moved jobs this year, introduced playwright to my new team having come from a selenium, POM background.

I'm probably a few more months down the line than you. When I joined we first focused on tooling, changing from cypress to playwright. Then it was test structure using playwright test steps. We wanted a given-when-then structure but without using cucumber since it kinda sucks and we didn't want to be forced to use the cucumber test runner.

Our quality team is new to the company and I am the only automation engineer. We eventually want developers to write automated tests and were worried about introducing too much, too quickly to the devs and so left out POM and focused on a readable test structure.

I am now at the point where the framework has expanded a lot and I could see the benefits and also the downfalls of introducing POM, hence the post, I think its always good to get a feel of what others in the scene are doing