Task

The e2e tests in 1.8 are just as unreliable as they are in main and 1.9.  This will block security fixes from getting into our Z stream and will cause unnecessary churn on our already tight schedules.   We have an estimated mid March release for 1.8.4, so we will need to prioritize stabilizing this as quickly as we can

Background

There have been efforts to stablize tests in the main and release-1.9 branches but these have not been backported to 1.8.   In addition, there was one case where 1.8 tests were committed to main after FF but not cherrypicked to release-1.8, causing further drift in the test suites.  

Dependencies and Blockers

QE impacted work
Documentation impacted work 

Acceptance Criteria

This task is to identify all necessary common/relevant fixes that can be backported to 1.8