IME it is always environmental factors. When you have 200 developers working on the same product without well defined boundaries it will be a mess with a monol

IME it is always environmental factors. When you have 200 developers working on the same product without well defined boundaries it will be a mess with a monolith, and a mess with microservices. Also arbitrary rules such as "one service per team" or "one service per employee" that force engineers to jerry-rig things that don't belong together. Either allow them to make a new service, make or a new team, or admit that microservices are not single-purpose and are just a blob of multipurpose code. I've seen this way too much. Also pure organizational inertia working against good engineering practices: sometimes a team will be severely overworked while others are overstaffed. But god forbid there's a temporary reorganization to improve the work of engineers, so people send tasks to other teams, but there's minimal communication between engineers.