Playwright: locator.click: Timeout 30000ms exceeded

Playwright did not give up on the click immediately. It spent the whole timeout retrying and never reached a state where the click was safe to perform. Before every click, Playwright resolves the locator and then waits for the element to be visible, stable (not animating), able to receive events (not covered by another element) and enabled. The TimeoutError means one of those checks was still failing when the clock ran out. The same message shape appears for locator.fill, locator.check, locator.hover and other actions, with that method name in front.

The headline never says which check failed; the call log underneath does. If the last line is waiting for getByRole(...), the locator matched nothing. If you see element is not visible, element is not stable or ... intercepts pointer events followed by retrying click action, the element exists but is hidden, moving or covered.

Raising the 30-second default rarely helps; it usually just makes the failure slower.

// JavaScript (Playwright 1.5x)
const banner = page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Accept all' });
if (await banner.isVisible()) await banner.click();

const submit = page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Submit' });
await expect(submit).toBeEnabled();
await submit.click();

# Python
page.add_locator_handler(
    page.get_by_role("button", name="Accept all"),
    lambda loc: loc.click(),
)
page.get_by_role("button", name="Submit").click()

Prefer user-facing locators (getByRole, getByLabel, getByTestId) over long CSS chains that break on markup changes. Handle consent banners and interstitials once, at the start of the flow or with addLocatorHandler. Record traces on retry (trace: 'on-first-retry') so every timeout comes with a DOM snapshot that shows what was really on screen.