Technology

I couldnt possibly deploy with any confidence a large project or honestly a small project I expected someone to rely on without layers of test.

In my world, that depends just about entirely upon how "dynamic" the code base is expected to be after release. We send a lot of things into the field, thousands of copies used for important work, which we pretty much know certain aspects of the system are unlikely to be changed once released. Others are very likely to be changed. "Back in the day" we'd make reasoned judgement calls about which ones would benefit from the effort of unit / integration testing and which ones that effort would be better invested elsewhere. As time marches on, our procedures and cross-departmental "advisors" who aren't so cozy with the code are relentlessly pushing for more and more automated testing. It is safer, no argument, but it also delays launch - sometimes without added value IMO.

I meant my first sentence to be an apology for jumping to conclusions but it clearly isn't. It's late. Sorry for the snarky response.

Well, I've seen large projects without extensive unit tests before. The main time I remember a big project with them before coding agents they were largely a checkbox that developers implemented with a grumble when first deploying a new system and then that were slowly disabled one by one as later changes broke them.

These were stand-alone projects, though, with a large QA department and without an expectation of future versions directly descended from them once deployed. If it worked then it worked, that was all that was needed at the end of the day.