I would say those two strategies are two different things.
As you said yourself, with in-memory db you can test your repositories as well, however, you have to test your repositories first to achieve separation of concerns. When you are designing your system, maybe according to the MVC, you want your Controllers before Models/Repositories, because firstly you have to decide what do you want to do and afterthat decide which entities will collaborativelly achieve that goal. So maybe creating controllers and mocking repositories first is a better way, afterwards you can test your repositories using the in-memory database if it is really easy to setup.