That is the whole deal, it was Web, so kind of easier than native, given its source based form, and even then, you had to bend the rules from TDD religion.
I think you're being a little uncharitable to the TDD folks here. Sure the early writing was very dogmatic, but real world TDD doesn't seem to be to be as rigid as you describe.
Or perhaps you've worked with some real TDD zealots, that doesn't sound like fun.
The folks I've worked with use these as guiding recommendations, not binding dictates.
For some of the UI stuff you mentioned elsewhere, I've seen a stronger focus on testing not just business logic, but view logic as well (where possible), but generally not to the degree of testing the rendered output of the UI. Maybe that's a thing somewhere, but I haven't personally seen it.
The same sort of thing should be possible for various kinds of native too. You'll need a selenium-esque library that can interact with UIs and take screenshots in your environment.
But yeah, if you dont have one of those tools or its super unreliable or it's only available in a language you cant use then you cant do this.
I dont really consider this to be bending the rules of TDD. It's more like next gen TDD IMO.
