I've had some good experience with a mix of those approaches, maybe not using mocks per se, but an "in-memory database implementation" (just a wrapper around the hash map that implements the same behaviors as a repository that deals with a real database) on one hand, and testcontainers on the other. (Still, using an in-memory db is way better than mocking, the tests are not coupled to the implementation details/the underlying model).

For simple use cases where I mostly just read/write from the database and don't expect any of those issues mentioned in the article (constraint violations or concurrency issues, because the application is quite simple tbh, plus I already have some testcontainers based integration tests for the components that deal with a real db and I reuse them) writing tests with an in-memory db implementation is quite nice - the setup is simple and running the whole test suite is instantaneous (literally something like 1-2s for a couple thousand tests, I don't need any framework for those kind of tests).

And on the other hand if I'm relying on something like an optimistic/pesimisstic lock or a framework feature, I will write a test with the real thing, using test containers. Also have a pretty good coverage with the components that deal with queues and databases specifically with testcontainers. And on top of that just a few e2e flows written using testcontainers as well.