I think that depends heavily on what sort of tooling you're using. E.g. writing unit tests for django is near impossible while integration tests are much easier. The ORM invariably has its tendrils throughout the entire codebase, and mocking it out is a project unto its own.

ORMs are excepted in my book. Good point. But DB integration tests are possible; slower than unit but still faster than end to end. I created some recently for a side project to make assertions about full text search behaviour, so I could swap out psql for elastc search (for my sins) and have coverage still.