You could give the built-in unittest module [1] a try. It's less magical (although also less flexible) and many of its old limitations that people used to cite as advantages of pytest (e.g. built-in test discovery) have since been fixed.
I'm relatively new to Python, coming from Ruby and JS, and the built-in unittest module is just fine. I haven't had any issues with it, besides the documentation for setting it up following the conventions is really hard to find. But once it works, I like how simple it is. If you know OOP you'll feel right at home. You can simply create your own test case classes if you want to re-use stuff. No magical bloated configuration.