Comment by mason55

Yeah the keys to make it all work are

1. It's easy to create the objects you need

2. Your creation functions are well tested so that the rest of your tests can rely on them.

If you have spotty coverage or just poorly defined creation semantics, or it's a bunch of calls to functions all over the place just to set up your test data, then this doesn't work.

But the solution typically isn't "write a bunch of JSON mock test data", it's to solve those problems.