The smoke tests that never got automated

I've been a frontend dev for a few years now, and there's a pattern I kept seeing across almost every small team I worked with. New feature ships. Everyone's happy. Then three days later something completely unrelated breaks and nobody caught it. Not because the QA testers didn't know what to test. They did. They had the test cases written, they understood the flows, they knew exactly what needed a smoke test after every deploy. The problem was always the same: automating that required Playwrigh