I appreciate the point, but I've heard this kind of thing several times before - last time around was hype about how Cypress would have exactly this effect (spoiler: it did not live up to the hype). I don't believe the new framework du jour will save you from this kind of thing, it's about how you write & maintain the tests.
I wish I had hard evidence to show because my normal instinct would be similar to yours, but in this case I'm a total Playwright convert.
Part of it might be that Playwright makes it much easier to write and organize complex tests. But for that specific project, it was as close to a 1 to 1 conversion as you get, the speedup came without significant architectural changes.
The original reason for switching was flaky tests in CI that were taking way too much effort to fix over time, likely due to oddities in Cypress' command queue. After the switch, and in new projects using Playwright, I haven't had to deal with any intermittent flakiness.
