This is correct. I think all programmers have to go through writing lots of tests and feel the burn. On the other side, you may reach a place where you know where you make mistakes and are extra careful to do things right in the first place.

But it is a spectrum. It is the big teams with a lot of code churn working in a less descriptive language that absolutely need tests.

Personally, I have written very few tests after I moved to clojure and small standalone teams. I hardly had to fix any bugs after.