The truth in this is that these things just depend heavily on both culture (e.g. communication patterns, "This is infra team's problem", etc) and technology cho

The truth in this is that these things just depend heavily on both culture (e.g. communication patterns, "This is infra team's problem", etc) and technology choice limitations (e.g. dependencies, api boundary safety, general safety, etc). And probably a ton of other things. The underlying technology is a bigger deal than people give it credit I think. I've written frameworks and complex applications at prior workplaces to try to manage microservices well. Now (cloudsynth), we use go + grpc + typescript and everything feels like it can be isolated/sharded if and when it needs to. Golang and webpack have great tooling for splitting things off, isolating dependencies, etc. Sometimes you don't have to live in the bimodal world of MicroServices vs Monolith.