When faced with a failing test, you make it pass as simply as possible, and then you summon all your computer science / programming experience to refactor the code into something more elegant and maintainable.
Why bother making it pass "as simply as possible" instead of summoning all that experience to write something that don't know is stupid?
TDD doesn’t promise to drive the final implementation at the unit level
What exactly does it drive, then? Apart from writing more test code than application code, with attendant burdens when refactoring or making other changes.