Snapshot diffing vs inline assertions for Jest-axe violation handling

In Jest-axe integrated test suites, the method for handling accessibility violations influences both test stability and regression coverage. Snapshot testing of violation reports captures the full violation set as a serializable artifact, enabling visual diffing across runs and preserving the history of genuine regressions, though snapshot maintenance increases when component markup changes frequently.

Inline assertions evaluate the accessibility report within the test body, allowing precise control over which specific violation types trigger failures. However, this approach increases test code verbosity and may lead to overlooking newly introduced violation categories that were not explicitly targeted.

The documented failOnViolation configuration option attempts to reconcile hard failures with warnings, but its behavior is not consistently documented across all jest-axe major versions, which can lead to unpredictable test outcomes depending on the library release.

Given these constraints, how should teams weigh snapshot maintenance overhead against the risk of missing violations in inline assertion suites? Does the failOnViolation option yield consistent failure modes across major versions? What patterns mitigate snapshot drift when markup changes without affecting accessibility?