Comment by edynoid

What you allude to there is pretty bad TDD. It was never intended as a replacement for good design, rather as an aid to be clear about design and requirements without writing tons of specs up-front.

And I agree, that there are lots of anti-patterns that have grown in tandem with TDD, like excessive mocking with dependency injection frameworks or testing renamed identity functions over and over just to get more coverage. However, I'd argue that is equally the fault of object-oriented programming though.

Where I disagree is this: TDD and unit tests are still a very useful tool. Their big advantage is that you can isolate issues more quickly and precisely, IF you use them correctly.

For instance, if I have some kind of algorithm in a backend service operating on a data structure that has a bug, I do not want to spend time on the UI layer, network communication or database interactions to figure out, what is going on. Testing at the right scope you get exactly that.