Save points, with proper management of them, seem to match a conceptual nested transaction as far as I've seen. We've got a test bed connection manager that mocks savepoint creation, rollback and committal into transaction management functions so doing something like beginTransaction && beginTransaction works fine.
Re:PostgreSQL 11.3 and 10.8
by atombender on Thursday May 09, 2019 @03:01PM
(#19871141)
There may be some semantic nuances. Savepoints aren't real transactions, so they "inherit" the locks of the parent transaction, for example. But it might not matter in practice in the context of tests.
Lastly, if a test fails you'd typically like to leave the data behind so that you can inspect it. A transactional test that rolls back on failure won't allow that.