Mocks are a contentious topic as you've probably guessed. In my opinion they're a sign of coupled code, you should be able to hit very high coverage without a single mock, but if you're a dev in an org that tracks code coverage you'll probably end up writing a fair number of them since the odds are high you'll be consuming coupled code.

But vastly faster.

A good rule of thumb for a unit test is that you should be able to run it a few thousand times in a relatively brief period (think: minutes or less) and it shouldn't ever fail/flake.

If a unit test (suite) takes more than a single digit number of seconds to run, it isn't a unit test. Integration tests are good to have, but unit tests should be really cheap and fundamentally a tool for iterative and interactive development. I should be able to run some of my unit tests on every save, and have them keep pace with my linter.

Then don't do it in unit tests and write an integration test.