> Software engineering has got - in my opinion, often needlessly - complicated, with people rushing to very labour intensive patterns such as TDD, microservices, super complex React frontends and Kubernetes.

TDD as defined by Kent Beck (https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/canon-tdd ) doesn't belong in that list. Beck's TDD is a way to order work you'd do anyway: slice the requirement, automate checks to confirm behavior and catch regressions, and refactor to keep the code healthy. It's not a bloated workflow, and it generalizes well to practices like property-based testing and design-by-contract.