[backport v2.14.5] [Automation] - Fix flaky login landing page tests

[izaac]

This is a backport of #18528 to release-2.14.

The commit applied cleanly, so the changes are the same as on master.

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Summary

Fixes rancher/qa-tasks#2455
Fixes rancher/qa-tasks#2456

Occurred changes and/or fixed issues

After login the app fetches user preferences before evaluating the after-login-route redirect. A transient failure of that fetch (e.g. a 401 while the session token propagates right after login) is silently swallowed by the app, which then falls back to the home page terminally, failing the URL assertion.

Reproduced locally by replying 401 to the first GET /v1/userpreferences after login, which produced the exact CI failure signature.

Wait for the post-login redirect chain to settle, and if it landed on the home page:

• for the regular landing flow, re-visit the root so a full app bootstrap fetches preferences again and re-runs the redirect
• for the auth redirect flow, retry the whole timed-out flow once, since authRedirect only lives in the store

Technical notes summary

Updated cypress/e2e/tests/pages/user-menu/preferences.spec.ts:

• Added settling logic (cy.location('pathname', MEDIUM_TIMEOUT_OPT)) to allow asynchronous preference fetching and SPA store state updates to resolve cleanly after login.
• Added recovery handling: if a transient auth propagation delay causes an initial fallback to /home, the test retries the bootstrap flow cleanly before asserting the final target URL.

Test only changes, no product code affected.

Testing done

Ran the @userMenu suite against a freshly provisioned Rancher on this branch:

Spec	Result
pages/user-menu/preferences.spec.ts	17/17 passed
pages/user-menu/account-api-keys.spec.ts	1/1 passed
pages/user-menu/logout.spec.ts	2/2 passed

20/20 passed with no retries, including the three affected tests:

• Can select login landing page - home page
• Can select login landing page - last visited (qa-tasks#2455)
• Can select login landing page - specific cluster (qa-tasks#2456)

Checklist

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Commit	Workflow run	Retried at
d0a745d	31054236363	2026-08-05 23:22 UTC