A common occurrence is something like a pool of 10 actions where a bunch of tests each do 3 to 7 of them. This is very hard to abstract with a function call.

Some languages are just noisy.

Go, Java I’ve experienced are noisier than others.

That makes the test harder to read. Tests should be dumb.

In the case I was referring to, mainly to keep the code consistent with what was already there and the PRs small, as the code base is primarily owned by a different team. It's also pretty innocuous short tests that read well as they are.