I don't consider myself an expert on this topic, but I can't shake the feeling that this person almost defines unit tests in a way that builds them up to fail,

I don't consider myself an expert on this topic, but I can't shake the feeling that this person almost defines unit tests in a way that builds them up to fail, but is not how people who use Unit Tests effectively would necessarily define or understand by the term unit tests. It's certainly not compatible with what Michael Feathers describes as unit tests in his "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" classic, a book I consider the bible on unit tests (even if a bit dated by now). If anything, many of the things the article describes as drawbacks of "unit tests" are exactly the things that Michael Feathers seems to describe Unit Tests are "not" if they are to be effective as unit tests. Obviously I'm being awfully vague here, but, yeah. That was the feeling I got from the article. It's just another case of "My particular definition of X, which is not necessarily what others understand by X, is bad. Use what I define as Y instead, which may be what some people used to mean by X in the first place, but let's call it Y from now on because X is bad."