The good idea of unit testing is repeatable, reliable tests, ideally those that can be run as part of CI before every merge and also on your end-user machine. "Unit" testing imposes an architectural demand on how you do this.

What you actually want is fast and self-contained integration tests. Have an API endpoint that returns some filtered data from the DB? Spawn a DB server locally, load some fixtures into it (e.g., phrased in the form of a migration), start up your application server, and curl it and see if the data is filtered. Then shut it down. In most stacks you can do all of this in a fraction of a second.

The reason most shops love unit tests is that it saves them from having to figure out how to run those integration tests. It's easier from a Conway's Law perspective to use your language's built-in testing facilities to test the function you're writing, let the ops team figure out how one starts up a database server, and let the frontend team figure out how one makes HTTP requests to your application. But you will deliver better software if you spend a bit of time figuring out all those things and stick them in a tiny shell script.