I’ve spent the last few years working on test infrastructure for blockchain projects so this question is regularly on my mind, and I’ve found the best solution

I’ve spent the last few years working on test infrastructure for blockchain projects so this question is regularly on my mind, and I’ve found the best solution is to just include the dependencies. Compute and storage is cheap enough that you can spin up these external tools and the extra level of assurance makes me sleep easier, and while flakey tests are theoretically an issue I rarely find them (and they tend to be programmatically fixable). If a unit test requires an external dependency then just use an integration test (or check it’s covered by system tests) and leave it at that.