It's strange to create records without assigning them to a variable and
then query the database to fetch the very same records. Assigning them
to a variable makes the tests easier to understand.
Besides, this way we avoid querying the database after the browser has
started.
JavaScript is used by about 98% of web users, so by testing without it
enabled, we're only testing that the application works for a very
reduced number of users.
We proceeded this way in the past because CONSUL started using Rails 4.2
and truncating the database between JavaScript tests with database
cleaner, which made these tests terribly slow.
When we upgraded to Rails 5.1 and introduced system tests, we started
using database transactions in JavaScript tests, making these tests much
faster. So now we can use JavaScript tests everywhere without critically
slowing down our test suite.
We were repeating the same code over and over (with a few variants) to
setup tests which require an administrator. We can use a tag and
simplify the code.