No, not really. It's a concept from the bygone era, before X-as-a-service took over a lot of software categories. It was intended to minimize friction between the QA and the development teams at the time the product was handed to QA. If the product had multiple defects, incrementally discovered, it would have to travel back and forth between the QA and the developers, stalling the development of the next version and generally creating a lot of noise and inconvenience due to the surrounding bureaucracy.

There's no need to write tests upfront for you to shift left. All shift left means is that testing happens during development. Whether you start by writing tests and then write the actual program or the other way around -- doesn't matter.