I’ve rewritten a bunch of our tests to this factory pattern last week, too (the factory is a fixture though - FactoryBoy is worth a look).

I’d argue that too many global fixtures in conftest have a high risk of becoming a “Mystery Guests” or too general fixtures. For a test reader it’s impossible to know the semantics of “institution_10”.

I believe this to be rooted in DRY obsession leading to coupling of tests: “We need a second institution in two modules? Let’s lift it up to global!”