I have had the exact opposite experience. People weren't using mocks therefore when you changed something at a low level, it caused tests all over the system to break that didn't particularly care about that behavior. It also makes test data set up much more complicated for both unit and integration tests.

I think there might be subtle differences is how we are mocking objects and how we organize our code that might make mocking have different outcomes. That's why I would like to see actual examples that can be deeply analyzed. I suspect that it's in fact the way the code is written and what the underlying platform allows that makes one more suitable than the other rather than mocks being fundamentally a poor choice.