There's a tradeoff for sure, but to fully evaluate that tradeoff you must also take into account the future time spent on the code base, including the amount of time needed to debug future features, adopt a new build environment, allow new team members to muck around and see what does and does not work...

If it's a small project that won't be extended much, then perhaps then re-runnable unit tests may not make the bar as a net positive tradeoff. But some time must still be spent testing the code, even if it's not tests that are written in code.