The biggest misunderstanding about TDD is that you need to do TDD to be good engineer and write good code as promoted by some TDD evangelists. Writing tests is important, writing good tests is important... what is not important is the order you write the tests or if you follow an arcane set of "rules" about how you should write tests as if they are some ancient divine wisdom someone discovered on a stone tablet that's the key to writing good software.

No... forget about writing tests inside out or outside in, top down or bottom up. Forget about the bs about "TDD is actually there to help you design the code so you SHOULD write tests first to expose flaws in your design". It does not matter as long as you write good tests and feel productive while writing code.

Maybe TDD "rules" and rituals are useful when you are a relative beginner and instead of overwhelming them with a ton of information it is nice to have a set of rules and steps you can follow that have a good chance of resulting in a decent final product. But at a certain point you need to what works best for you and ignore the TDD dogma.

I am not anti-TDD, I practice TDD for parts of the code but do it in a way that if a TDD purist saw it they would term it blasphemous. I never use TDD as a design tool, on the contrary I always design the general structure of a class or a package based on intuition and experience without writing a single line of test code. Then when I have the general design and skeleton functionality of the module fleshed out I jump into tests and start doing TDD to start filling out the functionality, addressing edge cases and so on. Coupling design with tests slows me down as it results in a lot of thrashing between tests and real code. I think a large number of developers feel this way and have never really bought into the "TDD is for design" hype. If on the otherhand TDD helps you design, go for it. The point is that TDD should not be treated like religious dogma that it often is.

The biggest advantage of TDD is the dopamine hit it gives you when a test goes from red to green. That hit is so powerful that I continue to do TDD maybe 50% of the time but don't it dogmatically like TDD purists would want people to do it.