I've seen a handful of applications that attempt to "scale" by going down the micro-service route in a completely flawed way. Only to end up with a tangled mess

I've seen a handful of applications that attempt to "scale" by going down the micro-service route in a completely flawed way. Only to end up with a tangled mess that's impossible to reliably debug. All progress halts. There's nothing inherently wrong about your statement, just that it's still far to easy to write shitty distributed system, and so much easier to push that complexity off onto the OS or even network layer itself. Why should I the application developer care about the way my user's data enters my DB? This should be tightly abstracted away, and traced/logged accordingly. Leave it to me the systems developer to get the details right, and share the fruits of my labor with everyone. I can imagine no system more deserving of shared resources than network technology. Try and imagine a world without TCP/IP, do you not end up with something similar?