Autify provides a Record & Playback style solution like the Selenium IDE, so the user does not write locators directly, but it does employ some of the methodologies discussed in this article.
When recording a test scenario in Autify, you poll the various attributes held by an element. In addition to id, class, name, and tag metadata, this also polls text content and coordinates — i.e., information seen by the end-user. When running the test code, it measures to what extent the onscreen elements correspond to these attributes and then grabs the best match.
This methodology is generally used for automatic correction (“self-healing”) of locators by AI, but one byproduct of this is ensuring maintainability of the production code. This goes beyond the text content and data-* attribute location methods discussed in this article in that it does not lock your production code to a specific format, both in terms of id and class and in terms of text content or other locators.
Autify is generally described as a no-code solution and is considered a product geared at non-engineers, but it also neatly handles problems associated with traditional forms of test automation and seeks to contribute to greater productivity of development projects worldwide.
CodeceptJS also exposes the aforementioned within method, making it ideal for use in the methodology discussed in this article. I encourage you to give it a try.