I think the promise of cucumber/gherkin is that one cannot write overly complex tests with them.

I’ve seen (somewhat) experienced engineers get lost in complex pytest environments that used a lot of mock objects. Over time, they lost clarity on what was being tested, how, and why.

The real value is to have an automated set of simple smoke tests.

Frankly, Cucumber serves a nonnegotiable reminder to me that the automated tests should be simple and straightforward.

For anything extremely complex, I’ll write unit tests instead of trying to craft ridiculous gherkin steps only used for a specific scenario. None of this “when it is midnight of a blood moon in a leap year and the second request attempt has timed out…”