I hate coding fundamentalism with a passion too. The only thing I get really religious about in coding is the importance of trade offs.

The cost/benefit of writing a test before just consistently exceeded doing it after for me.

Same for integration, e2e or unit tests (there's never been a rule that says you can only TDD with a unit test).

The cost/benefit trade off for tests with mocks vs. database is a different topic - orthogonal to the practise of red/green/refactor, and one where IMO the trade offs are much less obvious.