Reading your comments I get the sense that you consider system architecture to be reducible to 2 possible choices (monolith and m.s.) and you are confusing dist

Reading your comments I get the sense that you consider system architecture to be reducible to 2 possible choices (monolith and m.s.) and you are confusing distributed systems with micro-service architecture. Would you consider a classic 3-tier (api - domain logic - database) to be a “distributed” system? Are micro-service systems “distributed”? (The answer is no to both, btw). Micro-services were promoted for a variety of reasons. One of which was facilitating rolling out projects by consulting companies given the economic incentives for such businesses. Related was the VC driven development model that required rolling out features at greater speed than that of thoughtful development. Another was (remains?) the prevalent lack of competence in designing schemas (required for the basic n-tier system culminating in the database tier).