It depends. If your monolith requires, say, 16 GB to keep running, but under the hood is about 20 pieces, each happily using less than 1 GB, tripling only a few

It depends. If your monolith requires, say, 16 GB to keep running, but under the hood is about 20 pieces, each happily using less than 1 GB, tripling only a few of these means you may be able to get away with (say) 25 GB. Whereas tripling your monolith means 48 GB. You can obviously (FSVO "obvious") scale simply by deploying your monolith multiple times. But, the resource usage MAY be substantially higher. But, it is a trade-off. In many cases, a monolith is simpler. And in at least some cases, a monolith may be better.