I’m confused and think I don’t get it.

If a webpage is an iceberg, the buttons and menus and dropdowns are the visible part. If I understand this page object, that’s what he proposes testing.

But the bit I care about is the bit underneath that will compose REST calls from those UI elements and sometimes make subsequent REST calls from the result of the previous ones.

That is the tricky bit to test, and the bit where we *still* fall back to manual testing and recorded demos for qa.

I was hoping this was a suggestion for a better selenium.

Playwright has replaced Selenium years ago.

Playwright also implements fixtures and Page Object Model:

https://playwright.dev/docs/pom