I thought it was both a floor wax AND a desert topping?

Perhaps you could explain this in yet another article that doesn't leave the user without actual solutions to the problem presented?

And, personally, I always thought providing mocks WAS in fact a valid testing strategy as you can now provide your "service" with dependencies that can deliver the correct data, data not normally seen, no data, errors, and so on in order to determine if said service is properly handling it's edge cases.