Russ, I’m getting more and more convinced your way (JS + DOM) is the way to go. But, the barrier to this is - you need to know JS.
How 'bout you did some tips n tricks post about this topic. For example, how to wait for element clickable using javascript executor or something like that.
Or, here’s one I’m currently struggling with: I have a spinner element (“Please wait while loading”) and I want to wait for it to be invisible. (This is a project I’m working on in Selenium, that’s why I haven’t posted it here before, but I think it could be useful even for Katalon users.) Waiting for the element to be invisible is flaky, i.e. it seems that sometimes I have to wait two times 
.
That means:
- sometimes a wait-for-invisible is correct and I am able to continue with the next step (clicking a button).
- other times I get the other-element-would-receive-the-click error, and when I put two wait-for-invisible commands in a row, it seems to work fine
- that makes me think there is something happening in the background (at least two events) that manifests as one event (“Please wait while loading”) in the browser window, but in the DevTools network tab I can see only one GET request
How could you implement this wait with JS? Or find if there are other events firing?