The TopologyTestDriver tool is essential for building Kafka Streams applications, allowing developers to write fast and deterministic tests that cover serialization/deserialization issues automatically. However, it has limitations, particularly in handling asynchronous processing and state stores. To overcome these challenges, developers can use the Awaitility library to simplify asynchronous testing and reduce test running time. It's recommended to utilize TopologyTestDriver for unit tests and reserve TestContainers-based tests for more complex scenarios where additional guarantees are required.