My point is that there isn't a tradeoff between getting "real work" done or writing tests. Either you write tests, or you spend the even more time mitigating the consequences of not writing tests. You can't save time by not writing tests (except for the most trivial cases).
>> spending time on writing a test suite has a very real cost
> Not spending time on writing tests has a very real cost
Yes. That's what "trade-off" means.