Both of these things can be true. I worked on a monolith with one database and boring, correct, transactions, and it was a joy for almost all the time. Producti

Both of these things can be true. I worked on a monolith with one database and boring, correct, transactions, and it was a joy for almost all the time. Productivity was high. We went through a few growing pains when we had some big reports, but the first pass just moved them to a ~100 line batch reporting system, that solved it for another 2 years. Then we hit growing pains again but by that time had a shiny new data warehouse and just moved them to use the data warehouse instead. There's truth to both sides of this, but optimising for where most engineering is happening, keeping developers productive, and simple solutions that everyone understands, have always paid off well in my experience.