RPA is essentially reading and automating the same user interface that a user would use.
Sounds amazingly similar to the screenscraping, keyboard buffer stuffing, spreadsheet automation workflows I helped build 30 years ago. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
And yes, these were a bear to maintain. Every damn UI change would break the process. You ended up spending most of your time adding error handling routines to limit the damage (some of these ran for 12 or more hours over night, and you didn't want one glitch to stop everything). I can remember one workflow that died because the operators added a "Happy New Year" message to the server logon at midnight on December 31st, which killed our automated process. Given the tight timelines we had, this really screwed up our schedule.
