[urbanautomaton]

But if you're having to create lots of mock objects, that's a huge signal that your objects are tightly coupled, and that not only are you writing a bad test, you've written a bad subject-under-test.

Yes, you still have to write integration tests. But the discipline of testing your objects in isolation and outlining the objects they collaborate with is a major benefit of using test doubles, not a downside. If you can't reason about your objects in isolation, how can you expect to reason about them in aggregate?

[chromatic]

If you can't reason about your objects in isolation, how can you expect to reason about them in aggregate?

I don't use my objects in isolation.

Maybe I can mock up some factory which creates model objects outside of my persistence mechanism, but what value is that? I care that when I create an object in response to an action from a real user the persistence mechanism produces the correct object.

I happily bulk load testing data into my persistence mechanism for testing purposes, but I see almost no reason to mock it for tests.