[AdrenalinMd]

I agree with this. At work we use both approaches but at different levels of the test pyramid.

To test integration with 1 dependency at class level we can use test containers.

But to test the integration of the whole microservice with other microservices + dependencies we use a test environment and some test code. It's a bit like an E2E test for an API.

I would argue that the test environment is more useful if I had to choose between the two as it can test the service contract fully, unlike lower type testing which requires a lot of mocking.