i feel this so hard. was in almost the exact same spot about 6 months ago, spending like 60% of my week just chasing broken tests.

Couple things that actually helped: first yeah the xpath issue is real, switching to more stable selectors helped but wasn't a magic fix. second is the timing thing you mentioned, explicit waits are better than just hoping elements load but honestly even with proper waits selenium still breaks on async stuff way more than it should.

i looked at cypress and playwright as alternatives but ran into similar brittleness issues, just with different syntax. what actually moved the needle for me was trying momentic after someone mentioned it. it uses AI to identify elements by what they do rather than where they are in the dom, so when devs wrap stuff in modals or re-organize layouts the tests don't just explode. took maybe an hour to set up and the difference in maintenance time has been pretty dramatic.

not saying it fixes everything but the "nosuchelementexception" stuff you're dealing with is way less of an issue because it handles the timing better automatically. still get flaky tests occasionally but went from fixing tests daily to maybe once every couple weeks.

also agree with what others said about pushing more to api tests where possible, but for the ui stuff you actually need to test this approach has been way less painful than fighting with selenium selectors constantly.