I think maybe the point of that quote is that failing tests are just noise. Either fix them or remove them. If I try to run all tests for some pull request and 20% fail, what does that tell me? In the case where we regularly have some number of continuously failing tests, it doesn't tell me much. Did my PR make it worse? Did my PR make it better? Having continuously failing tests definitely doesn't add value and explicitly makes things harder to reason about when looking at test results.