[hugs]

i'm at the edge of my chrome internals knowledge here, but i'd answer the question with a question: isn't backendnodeid only stable within a single session?

that might not matter if the agent is re-finding the element between sessions anyway, but then you're paying a lookup cost (time + tokens) each time. compared to just using document.getelementbyid() on an explicit id.

[nikisweeting]

iirc it's stable across sessions until the tab closes, even though their docs dont guarantee it.

we cant modify the dom to add IDs because we'd get detected by block-blockers very quickly. we're gradually trying to get rid of all DOM tampering entirely for that reason.