Having recently worked on projects which have areas of the codebase that border on 'Mock hell' (due to testing taking too much priority over refactoring) I'm still thinking of how best to approach this for the tests which interact with SQLAlchemy

I began to develop a layer between the objects and the SQLAlchemy calls, which seems to closely reflect this: https://www.cosmicpython.com/book/chapter_04_service_layer.html#_introducing_a_service_layer_and_using_fakerepository_to_unit_test_it

I'll read through more of this and at some point I'll probably continue and implement it in this way