You're right, and I think most engineers know it. The debate persists as a proxy for a separate debate: E > I want to reorganize this because it's ugly and har

You're right, and I think most engineers know it. The debate persists as a proxy for a separate debate: E > I want to reorganize this because it's ugly and hard to work with as it is M > I want you focusing on this list of features/bugs and not introducing risk by making changes for other reasons Something doesn't feel right about: E > I'm the expert, you have to take my word that this change is necessary So if depending on whether E wants to join or separate, they put on their I-hate/heart-microservices hat and rehash whichever side of the tired old debate serves them. People who agree or disagree dust off their I-hate/heart-microservices hats, and we go to town for a while. We're not actually arguing for micro vs macro, we're talking about the context specific details, we just dress it up in those terms because M is in this meeting and M isn't close enough to the code to keep up with a conversation about the details. If enough energy is not expended in this process, whoever lost the debate goes and writes a blog about why they were right. Except nobody will read a blog about their specific codebase, so it ends up being about whether they heart/hate microservices.