Most teams over-abstract too early. Four custom commands are worth writing on every Cypress project — login, seed, intercept, visit. The rest can wait.
POM was a Selenium-era solution to a Selenium-era problem. In modern Cypress and Playwright, custom commands and locator helpers cover 90% of what POM was supposed to give you.
Cucumber and Gherkin make sense when non-technical stakeholders write tests. They don't make sense when engineers write tests for engineers. Here's the pragmatic test: who actually reads your tests?
The Cohn test pyramid has been gospel since 2009. It was a useful heuristic for a 2009 monolith Java app. It's been quoted unchanged ever since — and most modern stacks don't fit its shape.
Wiki pages about APIs go stale in three months. The API test suite gets opened every single day. Write tests that read like documentation — and stop writing the wiki.