You need to mock them because you are asserting that it is the correct thing to use. Verification testing has nothing to do with state, per se. Having a static instance a wrapper just to use another static is java forcing unnecessary state. Forcing a singleton to instance another singleton at runtime is idiotic, which is why spring proponents avoid it and java is still a syntactical dinosaur. When we see proper modules (including static refs), java will be better fir it.

PHP is better with how it deals with statics today, which bleeds into other areas like testing.