[Dylanlacey]

^^ All of this. I work for Sauce Labs; We've been pretty focused around Selenium but we're building out support for Puppeteer, Playwrite, Cypress et al.

The newer automation tools benefit from being newer; They can take advantage of hardened, well designed interfaces (like the Dev Tool protocol). Selenium's been around for a bit longer, and was built when browsers didn't make it easy to control them. That's influenced the semantics of Selenium quite a lot, as well as explaining the extra moving parts (Drivers exist to map the Selenium Wire Protocol (or W3C protocol) to whatever they're driving because Selenium wasn't built with a specific browser in mind).

I feel like, at this point in time, the real difference is how much abstraction you want from the browser. Selenium is a set of knives, Puppeteer is a Die Cutter. You'll put in more work with Selenium, but maybe you need something do happen a REALLY specific way. Or, you might just need shapes cut, and Puppeteer will be more reliable and faster.