> > “it is blasphemy to delete a test”,

> was ever a thing. i still don't.

I experienced this when working at a giant company where all the teams were required to report their "code coverage" metrics to middle management.

We had the flaky test problem too, but I think another angle of is being shackled to test tech-debt. The "coverage goals" in practice encouraged writing a lot of low quality tests with questionable and complex fixtures (using regular expressions to yoink C++ functions/variables out of their modules and place them into test fixtures).

Fiddling with tests slowed down a lot of things, but there was a general agreement that the whole projected needed to be re-architected (it was split up over a zillion different little "libraries" that pretended to be independent, but were actually highly interdependent) and while I was there I always felt like we needed to cut the Gordian knot and accept that it might decrease the sacred code coverage.

Not sure if I was right or what ever happened with that project but it sure was a learning experience.