And best practices depend.

Recently, I discovered that the ruff linter for Python doesn't like the assert statement, because since it does nothing in "optimized" mode it isn't reliable. But such complaints about unit tests are not particularly useful.

Rule S101 [1] is not in the default settings. If you choose to enable it, you have the possibility of disabling it for your tests like so:

    [tool.ruff.lint.per-file-ignores]
    "tests/*" = ["S101"]

[1] https://docs.astral.sh/ruff/rules/