I think this is probably true for larger or more distributed corporate environments, but I think a modular monolith is going to be a more productive and flexibl

I think this is probably true for larger or more distributed corporate environments, but I think a modular monolith is going to be a more productive and flexible architecture for most teams, and should be the default option for most startups (many of whom are doing microservices from day 1 it seems). 1. Is auto-enforced modularity, separation of concerns, etc actually better than enforcing these things through development practices like code review? Why are you paying people a 6 figure salary if they can't write modular software? 2. Is the flexibility you gain from this loose coupling worth the additional costs and overhead you incur? And is it really more flexible than a modular system in the first place? And how does their flexibility differ? With an API boundary breaking changes are often not an option. In a modular codebase they can easily be made in a single commit as requirements change. 3. Is bring-your-own-language actually a good idea for most businesses? Is there a net benefit for most people beyond attracting and retaining talent? What about the ability to move developers across teams and between different business functions? Having many different tech stacks is going to increase the cost of doing this. I do see the appeal of some of these things, but IMO the pros outweigh the cons for a smaller number of businesses than you've mentioned. And the above is only a small sample of that. Most things are just more difficult with a distributed system. It's going to depend on the problem space of course, but most backend web software could easily be written in a single language in a single codebase, and beyond that modularization via libraries can solve a lot of the same problems as microservices. I'm very skeptical of the idea that microservices are somehow going to improve reliability or development speed unless you have a large team.