A big reason companies constantly cycle between "developers should own QA" and "we need a dedicated QA team" is the E2E maintenance cliff.

It's easy for developers to own 50 E2E tests. But from what we see with our users, it's a nightmare when they scale to thousands of tests, and between releases, 10 features might have changed, suddenly causing 300+ tests to fail simultaneously in CI. No developer wants to spend three days debugging and updating the tests, so the test suite rots.

The bottleneck for large-scale E2E testing isn't creation, it's maintenance. We built Stably (https://stably.ai) specifically for this—we have a scalable cloud infrastructure that can process hundreds of concurrent Playwright test failures, understand them by stepping through the failure traces to debug the UI drift, and auto-fix the test scripts in minutes. Developer-led QA only works if you completely remove that massive maintenance tax.