[MoreQARespect]

>We try to replace them every time we come across one that needed adjusting actually. Quick is bad here. And yes they're flaky as hell if you use them for everything. Even a tiny change to just introduce a new element that's supposed to be there can change unrelated parts of snapshots because of generated names in many places.

If you can't keep the flakiness under control then yeah, they'll be worse than useless because they will fail for no discernible reason at all.

[tharkun__]

Oh the reasons are discernable. I call it flaky when you make an unrelated change and the snapshots change. You go check why and all you can do is a facepalm. What you and I call "unrelated" may be different. Such as when I make a CSS change that simply affects some generated class names for example and a bunch of snapshots fail. This will be worse in code bases with lots of reusable CSS of course, i.e. your blast radius for flakiness will be much larger the more CSS reuse you have and the more snapshot tests you have. Ours is very controllable but only because we're doing the right things (such as reducing snapshot use).

That's when you start cursory looks at the first few changes and then just regenerate them, which means they will never find any actual bugs coz you ignore them.

It's "the boy who cried wolf" basically.