In all honesty, I think the monolith/microservice distinction misses the point a little bit. It's inevitable that the longer the codebase exists, the more diff

In all honesty, I think the monolith/microservice distinction misses the point a little bit. It's inevitable that the longer the codebase exists, the more difficult it is to maintain. It's a battle that you can't necessarily win and it's turtles all the way down as your dependencies, and their dependencies, tackle the same issues. All it takes is one or two roughly defined APIs and you've already created the nucleation point for ever-more tech debt, and while you'll be able to tame some of it you won't manage all of it due to business requirements, or other teams depending on private APIs to save time, or whatever else you can imagine. Switch the architecture and you'll either have all your problems bunched in one codebase, or you'll have distributed your problems all over the place. I'd go as far as saying that a perfect monolith and a perfect distributed architecture are theoretical ideals that require perfect communication to build them.