I liked this post. To paraphrase, we need to write tests that are really useful and not because we have to do TDD. There are some cases where I found unit tests very useful (where the function was complex, with lots of different types of input that were possible, and each combination had some specific result). There were others (like CRUD operations) where unit tests are totally useless and a maintenance nightmare.

But best of all I like the "service" level tests. I write a ton of them - but no dependency injection. If it depends on an upstream service or a database, I let it use the service or database. No mocks. This strategy has given me immense confidence before I push any changes to production.

Finally, we also developed an open-source API tester as a VS Code extension, where you can specify these tests (no coding required, unlike Postman!) in YAML and run them on different environments - laptop, staging, testing, production ...

Do take a look, and if you find it useful, incorporate it into your testing routine: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=AgroStar.zzapi