I used playwright aria snapshots mainly, and less on screenshots because there is a lot of unnecessary info in the screenshot, but the aria snapshots do really well. Have you tried using aria snapshots for exploration too?

Also wow I have been building something similar to that 2 year endeavor. But I didn’t think to store the tests in the actual codebase because the idea was to never look at the codebase for the vibecoders and such. But reading all of this I’m rethinking my technique there, why have the artificial constraint?