Your experience agrees with mine. It may be TEDIOUS, but it's generally easier to fix underengineering which (IMO) tends to be wide but not deep issues.

Overengineering has its hooks everywhere; even WITH tests, changing something changes everything.

I've come to realize that at least for the level of engineering I'm exposed to that boilerplate is not always bad, copy/paste is perfectly valid to a point (which for me is usually "2-3"), and DRY is a tool, not a design goal.