Today, after more than a year of frustration with Spotify's official desktop app, I found this minimalist cli and tui spotify_player app.
The official Spotify app has some very limited applescript support but is otherwise a useless web wrapper. I had to install Spicetify to get rid of the podcast suggestions and disable automatic updates that broke all my macros almost every week because they changed the resolution ever so slightly, or nudged the playlist title down just a bit, or recoloured the button, or completely changed the cover art, or ... on and on.
The documentation is really thorough, so I won't reiterate it here, but if anyone is wanting to control Spotify with macros, I definitely recommend taking a look at this app. No more Applescript, no more 'activate Spotify, then do the things, then reactivate the previous app', no more janky macros built entirely with found image actions and prayers. Even though it isn't my fault — because web wrapper, I'm a little embarrassed to share it, but I want to demonstrate the improvement here... these two macros do the same thing:
So, I have to rewrite all my macros now, but at least it won't take long!