This doesn't sound like you really used TDD. TDD is about driving the design. It's so much faster to run a test against just the small piece of the code that you're working in than to boot up the entire system. Some conditions you might want to test for may be difficult to impossible to deliberately set up in a real system, and may be undesirable to set up there.

Also, I can't tell you how many times an entire team that doesn't work TDD is brought to its knees by a problem in the real system, but because I don't need the entire system working, I am still making rapid progress.

IME, people who don't want to test are the ones who lack confidence. They don't believe they can write the tests AND the code in the same time it would take them to just write the code. They're simply unaware how much time they're often wasting on long cycles.

But good job writing an article that will bait people into interacting with it so you get paid more.