Comment by hitchstory

The pyramid makes sense for certain types of application - very logic heavy with light integration touch points with everything cleanly dependency injected. rqlite fits this pattern.

If you're building a logic lite application which has a lot of integration touch points (I find most commercial code actually fits this pattern) then it makes zero sense - an integration test heavy test suite is what you want - an upside down pyramid if you will.

If you have a ball of mud on your hands then it doesnt matter what kind of app it is, E2E tests are the only thing that makes sense and you need to build very sophisticated fakes (requiring a lot of engineering skill) to avoid things like flakiness bugs and the token scraping problem you referred to.

If you're writing a parser, you probably want 100% unit tests and property tests for all those millions of parser edge cases. No pyramid of any shape is required, just a slab.

The testing pyramid reminds me of microservices: the people who came up with Their Grand Idea had no clue what it was about their specific circumstances that made their approach work for them but still managed to market it as The Way.

Realistically, the ultimate shape of your test suite should be an emergent property based upon a series of smart, local decisions - ideally TDD'ed tests which match the kind of code you are writing right now. Making a particular shape a goal is asinine.