IME end-to-end tests in a browser really help with services that have a lot of parts to integrate, but damn they are hard to make reliable.
One challenge is animation and timing races, supposedly Playwright can address many of those. Another is some infrastructure like GitHub Actions can be randomly resource starved, such as causing the Chrome Driver to become unresponsive. Automated retrying is one workaround, at the cost of possibly papering over rare race and timing issues.
Of course unit tests are nice and fast and narrow. But refactors could render a large portion obsolete, and they won't prove things work together as a whole.
One challenge is animation and timing races, supposedly Playwright can address many of those. Another is some infrastructure like GitHub Actions can be randomly resource starved, such as causing the Chrome Driver to become unresponsive. Automated retrying is one workaround, at the cost of possibly papering over rare race and timing issues.
Of course unit tests are nice and fast and narrow. But refactors could render a large portion obsolete, and they won't prove things work together as a whole.