Ok, I see what you're getting at there.

So if it takes you significant time to get proper defect locality, I think you should see if there's a better way to approach the problem. This should be essentially the default for typical/modern unit tests. Perhaps you're writing tests that are more like system level tests?

I'd also say that if you're essentially certain a test will never break, then (other than for documentation purposes) why are you writing it? To paraphrase Kent Beck - we should only test things that could possibly break.

You might be overgeneralizing what "people" say about unit tests - I'm not sure what your specific scenario is, but there are a whole spectrum of opinions on the subject. Perhaps this is just an organizational code-smell of the place you're mentioning.

Dogmatism/cargo culting in general can be annoying however.