Comment by sampullman

I don't like mocking either, but there are periodically situations where I've found it useful. Sometimes there is a complex system (whether of your own design or not) that isn't amenable to integration/e2e testing, and the interesting parts can't be easily unit tested due to external or tightly coupled dependencies.

Of course you can always pick it apart and refactor so it can be unit tested, but sometimes the effort required makes mocking look pretty appealing.