I agree with most of the problems OP describes, but find the article lacking two important things.

It is always easy to say "don't do X". But without explaining how that can be replaced with- or ported to an alternative, it is a quite hollow advice.

For me, Cucumber is not just the Gherkin syntax. It is, first and for all, a turnkey setup that allows me to have browser interaction (including selenium), organised in a nice and workable way.

How I would implement something like:

  When "I fill in my payment details" do
    fill_in "Creditcard Number", "1111111222"
    fill_in "ccv", "1234"
  end

In, say, Minitest or MinitestSpec is beyond me.

Are there good resources on doing proper integration tests as OP suggests? There are entire books on Cucumber, yet I cannot find something similar on Minitest.

Is it easy to set up a toolchain that allows me to use Capybara and Selenium (phantom.js) interchangeble in my integration tests? If so, is there a place where I can find documentation on that?