Record the expensive artifacts only when a test is being retried, and keep cheap ones on failure. Playwright's CI guidance is to record traces on the first retry:

import { defineConfig } from '@playwright/test';

export default defineConfig({
  retries: process.env.CI ? 2 : 0,
  use: {
    trace: 'on-first-retry',
    video: 'on-first-retry',
    screenshot: 'only-on-failure',
  },
  reporter: [['html', { open: 'never' }]],
});

The distinction matters. retain-on-failure records a trace or video for every test and deletes it when the test passes, so you pay the recording cost on every run. on-first-retry records only when a test has already failed once, which costs nothing on a green run and still captures the failure you need to debug.

A trace holds the action timeline, DOM snapshots, console output and network requests. Upload the playwright-report and test-results folders as CI artifacts even when the job fails, then open a trace with npx playwright show-trace path/to/trace.zip or from the HTML report.

Sources: Playwright trace viewer, Playwright use options, Playwright CI