Yes, I was wondering about the same thing. However, I haven’t been active in relevant communities since a few months after the covid crash. So, I don’t know “what’s up” with the market.
But I think ETFs are still valid. Due to the once-in-a-lifetime events of the past years, I think it’s just many companies having difficulties and a similar amount of other companies doing great. Hence the sideways trend. Or its just the rich controlling the trading being more conservative and buying out everytime they can.
Luckily, our e2e tests are pretty stable. And unfortunately we are not given the time to write integration tests as you describe. The good thing would be that with these mocks we were then also be able to load test single services instead of the whole product.
We merge multiple times a day and run only those e2e tests we think are relevant. Of course, this is not optimal and it is not too rare that one of the teams merges a regression, where one team or more talented at that than the others.
You see, we have issues and we realize we have them. Our management just thinks these are not important enough to spend time on writing integration tests. I think money and developer time are two of the reasons, but the lack of feature documentation, the lack of experts for parts of the codebase (some already left for another employer), and the amount of spaghetti code and infrastructure we have are other important reasons.