Yes, and I've gone the other way too, i.e. taking a bunch of microservices and rewriting them as a monolith, saving the company over a million dollars a year in

Yes, and I've gone the other way too, i.e. taking a bunch of microservices and rewriting them as a monolith, saving the company over a million dollars a year in the process. It isn't one or the other, the 'skill' is knowing which to apply when. To make most of these types of projects work, the sponsor needs to demand an incremental approach that delivers real value, piece by piece, all the way up to retiring the original system(s). Tie-out is also necessary for many projects, and all the associated testing. It is a big grind, which is probably why so many of these projects fail.