You can install Puppeteer without downloading the bundled Chromium (PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD env variable), but you need to be careful to use it with a version of Chrome/Chromium that has a compatible dev tools api version.

I too have experienced flakiness in CI where Chrome doesn't always seem to start or quit within a reasonable amount of time. I get around this in production with timeouts that give any lingering Chrome processes a series of increasingly aggressive requests to quit, but my hosted CI environment doesn't like it when I send kill signals to random PIDs.

I'm hoping that this Firefox client will be somewhat more reliable in that regard.