[pydry]

>Whenever I hear these statements, it always sounds like "I need to have an identical copy of this skyscraper in order for me to be able to replace one tap on floor 42."

The building industry also has the problem the OP describes:

https://i.stack.imgur.com/yHGn1.gif

The problem as I see it is that people who go all in on unit tests tend to be dogmatic about it and suffer the above type of issue whereas the people who want, broadly speaking, to run things as realistically as possible are pretty aware of the real constraints.

Moreover modeling larger is also frequently cheaper because the real thing often comes for free while creating elaborate frequently changing unit test mocks has very high opex.

[_kblcuk_]

Oh yea, and also you get that fuzzy "I clicked random things around, so everything should work, because I run everything locally" feeling. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯