Even if the framework is fine, you can see something like an elaborate if-else tree, or even a try-catch block, and after it's all done, there's a condition check with `fail()`. So the point of failure could be manually detached from the actual point of failure.
Granted, this is not the way to do things. But it happens anyway.
I mean in your example it’s someone choosing not to use asserts. Which is a problem, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not the problem being talked about here.
The comment thread is about “Assertion Roulette” — having so many assertions you don’t know which went off. Which really seems like a test framework issue more than a test issue.
If that's the case, the test framework itself is severely flawed and needs fixing even more than the tests do.
There's no excuse to have an assert function that doesn't print out the location of the failure.