It's not really contradictory; it just says that this pattern has benefits and sometimes they're not worth the cost. To your other point, that was my first tho

It's not really contradictory; it just says that this pattern has benefits and sometimes they're not worth the cost. To your other point, that was my first thought as well. The main counterargument that comes to mind is that if all your systems (and those they're interfacing with which you don't control) aren't subject to the whole load at once (assuming you have more than one service running and thus care about the effects of interactions) or if there's some nondeterminism or emergent properties at play (so that you're not just looking at monotonic components combining together) then the bimodality of that system is still undesirable; perhaps it hits a nice point in the cost/benefit curve though.