mocha: 🐛 Bug: Negative functional tests started to throw "Uncaught Error" after mocha update to 8.2.0

Prerequisites

• Checked that your issue hasn’t already been filed by cross-referencing issues with the faq label
• Checked next-gen ES issues and syntax problems by using the same environment and/or transpiler configuration without Mocha to ensure it isn’t just a feature that actually isn’t supported in the environment in question or a bug in your code.
• ‘Smoke tested’ the code to be tested by running it outside the real test suite to get a better sense of whether the problem is in the code under test, your usage of Mocha, or Mocha itself
• Ensured that there is no discrepancy between the locally and globally installed versions of Mocha. You can find them with: node node_modules/.bin/mocha --version(Local) and mocha --version(Global). We recommend that you not install Mocha globally.

Description

After the recent mocha bump to 8.2.0 our functional tests on CI started to throw unexpected “Uncaught Error” failures while before everything was working kist fine.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Checkout the https://github.com/appium/appium-espresso-driver repository
2. Run npm i on it
3. Start Android Emulator named “Android”
4. Mark only the test should not work if getting an attribute that does not exist for execution to save the time
5. Run gulp transpile to transpile the source
6. Run mocha: npx mocha --timeout 6000000 --reporter mocha-multi-reporters --reporter-options config-file=./ci-jobs/mocha-config.json --recursive build/test/functional/ -g @skip-ci -i --exit

Expected behavior: [What you expect to happen] The test should pass

Actual behavior: [What actually happens]

The test is shown twice as passing and failing with an “Unexpected error” exception:

  2 passing (1m)
  2 failing

  1) element attributes
       getAttribute
         should not work if getting an attribute that does not exist:
     Uncaught Error: [element.getAttribute("some-fake-property")] Error response status: 13, , UnknownError - An unknown server-side error occurred while processing the command. Selenium error: An unknown server-side error occurred while processing the command. Original error: Attribute name should be one of [content-desc, class, text, package, checkable, checked, clickable, enabled, focusable, focused, scrollable, long-clickable, password, selected, visible, no-multiline-buttons, no-overlaps, no-ellipsized-text, bounds, resource-id, instance, index, adapters, adapter-type, hint, view-tag]. 'some-fake-property' is given instead
      at exports.newError (node_modules/wd/lib/utils.js:152:13)
      at /Users/elf/code/appium-espresso-driver/node_modules/wd/lib/callbacks.js:94:19
      at /Users/elf/code/appium-espresso-driver/node_modules/wd/lib/webdriver.js:205:5
      at Request._callback (node_modules/wd/lib/http-utils.js:89:7)
      at Request.self.callback (node_modules/request/request.js:185:22)
      at Request.<anonymous> (node_modules/request/request.js:1161:10)
      at IncomingMessage.<anonymous> (node_modules/request/request.js:1083:12)
      at endReadableNT (_stream_readable.js:1201:12)
      at processTicksAndRejections (internal/process/task_queues.js:84:21)

  2) element attributes
       getAttribute
         should not work if getting an attribute that does not exist:
     Uncaught Error: [element.getAttribute("some-fake-property")] Error response status: 13, , UnknownError - An unknown server-side error occurred while processing the command. Selenium error: An unknown server-side error occurred while processing the command. Original error: Attribute name should be one of [content-desc, class, text, package, checkable, checked, clickable, enabled, focusable, focused, scrollable, long-clickable, password, selected, visible, no-multiline-buttons, no-overlaps, no-ellipsized-text, bounds, resource-id, instance, index, adapters, adapter-type, hint, view-tag]. 'some-fake-property' is given instead
      at exports.newError (node_modules/wd/lib/utils.js:152:13)
      at /Users/elf/code/appium-espresso-driver/node_modules/wd/lib/callbacks.js:94:19
      at /Users/elf/code/appium-espresso-driver/node_modules/wd/lib/webdriver.js:205:5
      at Request._callback (node_modules/wd/lib/http-utils.js:89:7)
      at Request.self.callback (node_modules/request/request.js:185:22)
      at Request.<anonymous> (node_modules/request/request.js:1161:10)
      at IncomingMessage.<anonymous> (node_modules/request/request.js:1083:12)
      at endReadableNT (_stream_readable.js:1201:12)
      at processTicksAndRejections (internal/process/task_queues.js:84:21)

The results of full CI run: https://dev.azure.com/AppiumCI/Appium CI/_build/results?buildId=11913&view=logs&j=ea3a8326-8ae1-5392-57d8-7054c454cdab&t=bf55eb97-8c00-5287-3ece-aba70d92322c&l=8299

Reproduces how often: [What percentage of the time does it reproduce?]

Always

Versions

• The output of mocha --version and node node_modules/.bin/mocha --version: 8.2.0
• The output of node --version: Tried locally with v13.12.0 and CI (v10)
• Your operating system
  • name and version: Mac OS 10.15.6
  • architecture (32 or 64-bit): 64
• Your shell (e.g., bash, zsh, PowerShell, cmd): zsh
• Your browser and version (if running browser tests):
• Any third-party Mocha-related modules (and their versions):
• Any code transpiler (e.g., TypeScript, CoffeeScript, Babel) being used (and its version): Babel v7.12.1

Additional Information

Downgrading mocha to 8.1.0 solves the issue