0 is falsy, might I suggest `while stale_element_retry:`?

Since the only options at this point in the method are return or raise, I would say do the returns in the while loop, and then raise an exception after the loop. "If all else fails, raise StaleElement..."

As for the loop itself, selenium already has some functionality around ensuring an element is visible. Would it be useful to mimic the behavior of _wait_for_visible_element here, with a very low timeout?