> I've asked them what their plan is when 500 of their 1000 test suddenly stop passing
That's not a terrible thing; would indicate that some shared behavior is broken and -- assuming well structured code -- hopefully easy to isolate the behavior.Bigger problems to me are more practical: 1) large tests waste context both in and out, 2) large volume of tests waste CI cycles which are becoming the bottleneck.
But more specifically, I usually see the explosion of test code in integration tests where there is heavy setup of entity graphs.