Same issue happens by just using Accessibility on macOS, like accessibility inspector or Voice Over, not only in UI Tests. To reproduce: open your sample app open accessibility inspector focus on the current app view in inspector navigate away see object graph showing previous view model is not released

Thank you Nathan, We see this on macOS Big Sur, specifically 11.5.2. FB9188594: Object graph shows strong reference only when we use Accessibility features (either by UI tests or even by Accessibility Inspector). In our AppStore app this creates memory footprint of 2.5 Gb instead of usual 45 Mb within 30 min of using the app. Basically every time user refreshes the view our memory footprint grows by megabytes. Appreciate any help!

For us we were running a CI job on a self-hosted github runner and encountered this error, signing in to xcode on the runner resolved this issue for us. Interestingly it wasn't necessary for macOS builds, only iOS.