On the mark. My favourite failure mode for this is throwing lot of effort into porting a chunk of the rancid old monolith into microservices without decoupling

On the mark. My favourite failure mode for this is throwing lot of effort into porting a chunk of the rancid old monolith into microservices without decoupling. This ends up with a stack of microservices that handle 1% of the total revenue generating traffic yet 80% of the infrastructure cost due to the additional complexity and adding 30% more overall latency due to the network hops and inflexibility of the service API. At the same time it doesn't deliver enough productivity doing this so there is gas being poured into the burning monolith too.