test(vrt): force-disable animations during VRT

[dr-itz]

---

Documentation.
Examples.
Dashboards Demo.
Playwright report.

Coverage Reports:

• charts-ng
• dashboards-ng
• element-ng
• element-translate-ng
• maps-ng
• native-charts-ng

[gemini-code-assist]

Code Review

This pull request updates several visual regression tests by removing custom pixel difference thresholds and updating the corresponding PNG snapshots. It also introduces animation stabilization logic in the test helpers when updating snapshots. The reviewer recommends applying this animation stabilization logic to all visual regression test runs, rather than only when updating snapshots, to prevent test flakiness due to discrepancies between snapshot generation and verification.

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[spike-rabbit]

What about just having a forceDisableAnimationsFlag?
This is only needed in rare cases.
Add least the overall job run seemed to be 30s slowser than before

[dr-itz]

Overall 30s slower isn't realistic, that from what, one run on unpredictable CI?

Some timings, locally on M1 Max with 4 workers and 5 vCPUs in the VM:

force disable all:   649 passed (8.3m)
explicit:            649 passed (7.8m)
combined:            649 passed (8.1m)

• force disable all is this MR as-is
• explicit is your suggestion
• combined is realising that we disable animations anyway for a11y tests, so move the disable/re-enable a level higher and wait for animations to have finished before VRT

So force-disable is 30s slower without shards.

Combined 0.3 minutes slower, that 18s (that's like 6s per job) while making everything more reliable, i.e. what Playwright should do in the first place. So I would argue that is the best approach. And CI timings vary anyway so reliability over a few saved seconds.

[spike-rabbit]

you are right, then lets do the combined one.

[dr-itz]

Done. Slowest e2e job this run was 5m36s, so not bad at all.

[spike-rabbit]

👍