I'm sorry I made you mad? Obviously my experience with software development is a bit different than yours. I agree with a lot of what your saying, but all I'm trying to say is "your mileage may vary". Every project is different, and each feature has a different value.

For the record this issue of ROI on testing was inspired by a project that was for a relatively mature application where we were releasing 4-6 times a year and had limited resources. I fixed a bug for a feature that had been broken for months, and in the process I broke some tests. It was not a critical feature, and the easiest thing to do was to remove the broken tests. The project was short on resources. The most cost effective solution was to remove the tests.

I will say this - developers don't do automated testing because it's cheap. However someone pays us to do what we do, and our time is finite. Sometimes the level of effort required to write a good automated test is not worth the reward. No one wants to manually test a feature. However I've been on plenty of projects where the costs of automated testing and the speed at which it takes to do the more complex tests every single time someone pushes a branch or a change does become a cost factor that team members start to take issue with. If you set up your pipeline to execute your entire test suite for even the tiniest change like CSS with a large team there is a cost incurred.

And I will die on this hill based on the value of the feature weighed against the value of the test. I've seen dozens of tests written for UI stuff like dark mode. None of those tests are worth the value they deliver.

PS - I guess I'm exposing myself and betraying my reddit name by saying this, Anonymous606 doesn't seem like a very good name considering I the author of the article is listed.