Every Playwright job spent a flat 90s on `npx playwright install ffmpeg`,
and none of them ended up with a usable ffmpeg.
The 2.3MB download finishes in under a second; extraction then hangs until
`timeout -k 10 90` reaps it (exit 124, masked by `continue-on-error`). That
is a Node 24.16.0 readable-stream change (nodejs/node#62557) colliding with
yauzl/fd-slicer never firing `close` after EOF, which hangs extract-zip.
It leaves a truncated `ffmpeg-linux` — 5,055,201 bytes against the zip's
declared 5,101,056, segfaulting on exec — and no INSTALLATION_COMPLETE
marker, so Playwright treated ffmpeg as uninstalled. `video: 'on-first-retry'`
has therefore never worked in CI, and every first retry of a flaky test died
in browserContext.newPage: exactly the failure the step existed to prevent.
Upstream fixed it in Playwright 1.60.0 (microsoft/playwright#40747) and Node
reverted it in 24.18.0 (nodejs/node#63834). Node 24.16.0 is pinned in 17
places including the Dockerfiles, so bump Playwright instead — it is a dev
dependency, and `^1.56.1` already permitted 1.62.1; only the lockfile pinned
it. Staying at or above 1.62.1 also avoids the tsconfig-resolution
regressions in 1.62.0.
Caching alone could not have fixed this: a cold cache still hangs, and what
would have been cached is the corrupt binary. So the ffmpeg download is now
restored from cache keyed on the resolved playwright-core version, the
install is skipped outright on a hit, and the cache is only saved once the
binary is verified to actually execute — a partial extraction can never be
promoted into a cache that every later job restores.
Per job: 90s to ~0s on a hit, ~2s on a miss.
