We’ve been using playwright for a year, test maintenance still eating all my time, what am I missing?

We switched from selenium hoping playwright would solve the maintenance problem and while it's better in some ways I'm still spending probably 60% of my time just keeping tests running.

Every feature ship or ui update means 10 to 15 tests need fixes and better locator strategies help but selectors still break when someone moves elements around or restructures the dom. We tried using test ids everywhere but devs don't always remember to add them and honestly I can't blame them, they have their own priorities.

I got into qa because I wanted to find bugs and improve quality but instead I'm basically a test maintenance engineer now. Im considering switching careers honestly because this doesn't feel sustainable.

Is this just reality with any automation framework or am I fundamentally doing something wrong? There has to be a way to write tests that aren't this fragile, right??