Probably the biggest sticking point for me is not knowing how your program should be structured ahead of time. You'll have trial and error along with plenty of refactoring, as you grapple with how the solution best fits the infrastructure you are writing for. Adding the overhead of writing tests for code/apis that are likely to change sounds like wasted effort. The fragmentation between different testing frameworks also doesn't help, with each having their own learning curve.

Maybe people should focus on coding a minimum viable product, then revisit it after they understand better how their product should work in the infrastructure they are using. They will then have a better understanding of the tests they should write. The tests would likely come in handy as their program matures, and errors/downtime to their users becomes a bigger issue than pushing a product out the door.

For example, think of restaurant hygiene. Safe food handling is hard work. And if you skimp on it, it's easy to say, "Hey, doing X isn't really necessary; nothing bad happened."

For me, TDD is similar, in that the benefits mainly come later, when you have a sizable code base that you can make big changes to without fear. I agree people should use it when appropriate; there are definitely times when I don't bother. But I'm concerned that people who haven't experienced success (and failure) with TDD will have poor intuition for when it's appropriate.