I strongly agree. Most of this felt fine, except about testing.

I'm frequently tasked with writing reliable services, and I always 100% of the time start with tests. Are they perfect? Absolutely not, but I am able to write, test, maintain and iterate on at-scale critical services with great confidence; and 90% of that confidence can come from well structured tests. My code is generally also easy to refactor, understand, port to other languages, etc. Testing is such a critical part of that. I only test things "in staging" as a last check; and very rarely am I disappointed with the behavior (sometimes the speed or scale, but not behavior)