To be fair, modular monoliths weren't talked about much before microservices. I'm thinking about the heyday of Rails, where there were bitter debates over wheth

To be fair, modular monoliths weren't talked about much before microservices. I'm thinking about the heyday of Rails, where there were bitter debates over whether you should even move critical business logic out of Rails. I got the impression that most devs didn't even care. (That was sort of the point where I saw that I was a bit of an odd duck as far as developers go if I cared about this stuff, and pivoted my career.) I really enjoy contexts where I can make modular monoliths, however. I'm thinking of mobile/desktop apps here, mostly. Software design is something of a lost art currently. This is partially due to the current zeitgeist believing that anything that automated tools cannot create/enforce can't be that important in the first place. Of course, there's a whole swath of concerns that cannot be addressed with static or dynamic analysis, or even different languages. Microservices is a response to the fact that a monolith without any real design moves quickly but can easily converge on spaghetti due to the fact that everything is within reach. It enables teams to create an island of code that talks to other islands only via narrowly defined channels. Additionally, they support larger dev teams naturally due to their isolationist take, and reinforce the belief that "more developers = always better" in the process. In other words, they mesh perfectly with the business context that a lot of software is being built in. Factor in the fact that $COOL_COMPANY uses them, and you have a winner.