Four tasks. A pure findOrFail helper with Vitest coverage, the nine unchecked lookups converted to use it, the expect timeout raised from Playwright's unset default of 5s to 10s, and the test #245 skipped brought back.
The helper deliberately imports nothing and lives apart from support/api.ts. api.ts imports @playwright/test, and vitest.config.ts runs with environment: 'node' over tests/unit only — putting the helper there would drag a browser harness into the unit suite to test six lines of pure logic.
Two things the survey changed. filters.spec.ts:216 is excluded: its .find() searches CSS class names on a string array rather than test data, so it has no missing-row failure mode. And three `expect(row).toBeTruthy()` assertions are deleted rather than kept, because findOrFail has already thrown by then — leaving them would tell the next reader the value might be falsy, which is the confusion the change exists to remove.
Worker-count reduction is explicitly not in this plan. It is a real lever and may still be needed, but applying it at the same time would make it impossible to tell which change fixed anything.
The plan states the criterion it cannot check: CI's load is not reproducible here, so two consecutive green local runs mean the refactor is sound, not that the flakiness is gone. Several consecutive green CI runs are the real bar, and #241 stays open until then.
Ref #241
