[Afton]

It's about tradeoffs. On one end you have precision, speed, reliability, diagnosability. At the other end you have "realness".

Unit tests fall on the far left, workload tests/E2E tests/testing-in-production fall on the far right.

It turns out that there's no 'wrong' level, there's just different tradeoffs. I've worked at a lot of companies that embraced the realness of E2E tests, but then suffered from the maintenance/performance/diagnosability/instability of those tests. I have colleagues who worked at places that avoided E2E at all costs, and suffered because they would have a green test run, but user scenarios that a simple E2E test would have caught, were completely broken.

IMO there is a lot that can be done to improve E2E testing at most companies, but they definitely have the capacity to add value to your release/testing pipeline.