AngularJS 1.x end of life: is ngMock $httpBackend stubbing still the right integration test strategy without production credentials?

Question

AngularJS (1.x) reached end of life in January 2022, meaning no further official patches, including security fixes. A legacy application on a specific 1.x minor version still needs integration-style tests for its $http-based service layer, but no real backend or production credentials may be involved.

The documented ngMock module provides $httpBackend, which intercepts $http calls and supports expectGET/whenPOST-style canned responses, header matchers for asserting outgoing Authorization headers, and flush() plus verifyNoOutstandingExpectation() to keep tests synchronous and deterministic. That covers request formation and response handling with obviously fake tokens, but it replaces the real transport entirely, so network, CORS, or TLS behavior is never exercised.

The unresolved decision is how much confidence this level of stubbing actually buys for an unmaintained framework, given that $http and $httpBackend behavior varies across 1.x minor versions.

Questions

Given AngularJS EOL, is $httpBackend stubbing still an acceptable substitute for integration tests against a real staging backend with non-production credentials?
Which 1.x version-specific differences in $httpBackend (promise and header handling) most commonly break tests when pinning to an exact version?
Is there a documented pattern for combining $httpBackend unit coverage with a minimal offline smoke test to catch what the mocked transport hides?

AngularJS 1.x end of life: is ngMock $httpBackend stubbing still the right integration test strategy without production credentials?

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