We've used a monolithic microservice architecture before and were happy enough about it. The application was basically structured in microservices, but develope

We've used a monolithic microservice architecture before and were happy enough about it. The application was basically structured in microservices, but developed in a single project (monorepo and all) and the build produced a single build artifact. At deployment time, configuration decided what set of services the monolith would boot and expose. Probably not for everyone (i.e. polyglot is hardly possible and it takes a lot of discipline to avoid a hairy ball of interdependencies), but it scales in ops complexity from very small setups to large ones, when needed.