[pydry]

My experience is 50/50 - half have dropped them, half still have them.

I also don't find most QA to be worthwhile compared to a good, quality focused dev.

There are several cultural issues with how QA are treated (low pay) and how they think they're expected to behave (e.g. hands off the code, hands off types, hands off unit tests) which make them less useful than a dev who is really good at engineering for reliability.

Where we had good engineering practices and that type of "black box" QA I noticed that product tended to find the majority of bugs, followed by devs, followed by customers, followed by QA.

Only when engineering practices sucked and they were used as a crutch by devs did they really catch a lot of bugs.

Of course, in these days of vibe coded madness they're probably getting more useful, not less.