[px1999]

My org uses codegen as a starting point for one of our test layers.

It works for us probably because we sidestep the pain points you list - the environments we run in are pristine complete copies of known datasets, we remove as many sources of randomness as possible, and our environment flakiness level is very low.

They still break but usually because the locators in use have been chosen poorly (or we've made planned changes to a page/component)

We're a web based b2b saas that runs an instance of the entire environment for each of our customers. Our non prod setup consists of a bajillion static test environments but more importantly we use testcontainers to spin up the transient test environments from database snapshots. Using the recorder on the static environments (before the transient ones existed) _was_ a pain