I think we're going trough a thesis/anti-thesis cycle on tests - in the beginning, there was militant testing, 100% coverage, testing getters and setters etc (as well as more complex stuff, obviously). Then some people started coming around to the idea that there are actually large swathes of code that is simple enough that testing doesn't actually add much value especially compared to the effort of writing them, then that probably got a bit out of hand (to what you're referring to). Maybe the pendulum will swing back and we'll find a good heuristic for just how much testing is the right amount that isn't all or nothing?
Actually, in the beginning there was no testing and even justifying having automated test infrastructure or spending developer resources on unit tests was a hard sell to management (what are they paying that QA dept. for after all).
