Complexity is never reduced, but made more manageable. Microservices make a good architecture a lot harder, certainly if you have to start with a blank slate an

Complexity is never reduced, but made more manageable. Microservices make a good architecture a lot harder, certainly if you have to start with a blank slate and don't really have an idea what you're up against. However, things that are virtually impossible to enforce or even very hard to implement in a monolith, are made manageable if you have the proper setup. That includes central standardised logging, tracing, metrics and monitoring. If you have these in place and can enforce them, you're off to a good start. These things rarely happen in a v1 though - which usually is a POC that ends up in production, and if you have a full-blown microservice architecture from the start, this will probably grow into something a lot worse than huge PHP monolith. With microservices you need to design a 'platform', and ad-hoc POC development never results in a good design, but just something that functionally works.