Each approach comes with its benefits and challenges. I would never suggest anyone jump right to a microservice architecture if they haven't come to appreciate

Each approach comes with its benefits and challenges. I would never suggest anyone jump right to a microservice architecture if they haven't come to appreciate the problems posed by a Rails-type design. One aspect I keep hammering on about with regard to microservices is reusability. If you're developing just one user-facing product, nevermind. But if you have a bunch of products, reusability across microservices is a huge boon compared to monoliths. Reuse all your job processing, notifications, data storage, login/auth/group/role/permission management, identity verification, image processing, NLP processing, feed processing, etc. etc. etc. across your entire stack. With monoliths, the only other option is to build these as libraries, and unless you want to write bindings or write code more than once, you're now chaining yourself to a specific language.