I've had a very similar experience. It's worth it's weight in gold when you can flesh out edge cases and logic issues before going all-in on an architecture, a

I've had a very similar experience. It's worth it's weight in gold when you can flesh out edge cases and logic issues before going all-in on an architecture, and being able to refactor without fear is a great bonus, but it's not always applicable. Unless the majority of the tests are "external" (i.e. testing an API by calling it's endpoints and testing the return), a major refactor is going to require updated tests, and it's all too common that I see people take the "easy" way out and fix the tests to conform to the way it's working after the refactor rather than the way it should work.