What's the best way to automate testing for microservices?

I am a professor at the University of Michigan, and I have been looking into how developers typically do end-to-end testing for microservices, especially involving mocking third-party dependencies and other services. I am requesting your feedback to best design our experiments; in the long run, we hope to publish a research paper and may include some of your quotes.

To me, the testing process seems quite cumbersome, as it consists in many steps, typically: 1. Creating an external cluster (say in Docker or Kubernetes) from a CLI (or maybe a web interface); 2. Setting up external implemented microservices, using a separate tool (e.g. Kubernetes manifests / helm charts, or docker-compose file); 3. Implementing and building mock containers and explicitly setting up all possible input/output requests; 4. Deploying the containers created in steps 2 and 3; 5. Setting up routing and networking between the main programs and the containers; 6. Running the tests manually or in a test framework (e.g., Jest or Pytest); 7. Creating and running whole-system tests, in the same or a different test framework.

I am wondering if this is indeed how developers typically do integration/component testing for microservices, or if there is a better way?

I am aware that some of this process can be automated using a tool such as Jenkins. I would be very interested to hear about your current approach to automated testing, or if there are tools you would recommend.