These two suggestions are fine, but I don't think they make fixtures really that much better--they're still a morass of technical debt & should be avoided at all costs.

The article doesn't mention what I hate most about fixtures: the noise of all the other crap in the fixture that doesn't matter to the current test scenario.

I.e. I want to test "merge these two books" -- great -- but now when stepping through the code, I have 30, 40, 100 other books floating around the code/database b/c "they were added by the fixture" that I need to ignore / step through / etc. Gah.

Factories are the way: https://joist-orm.io/testing/test-factories/