Anec-contra-data: I worked for a while at a small startup, initially as the sole developer and eventually growing to 3. We had an architecture I would describe

Anec-contra-data: I worked for a while at a small startup, initially as the sole developer and eventually growing to 3. We had an architecture I would describe as at least being "microservices-esque": a single large "monolithic" backend service, with a number of smaller consumer services, webapps, UIs. The distinction between microservices and monoliths may be debatable but I believe monoliths as described by Martin Fowler typically involve your primary service logic and your UI coexisting. I've found that splitting these at least is usually fruitful. I think this approach is sometimes called "fan-out", though I've seen that term used to describe other different things too; namely the opposite where there's a single monolithic UI layer fanning out to many micro upstreams. TL;DR: Fowler's opening 2 bullet points seem likely to be a false dichotomy as he's force-classifying all architectures into two buckets.