I don't disagree but I suspect that proliferation of components within a monolithic app is roughly comparable and leads to similar maintence burdens. If I'm ri

I don't disagree but I suspect that proliferation of components within a monolithic app is roughly comparable and leads to similar maintence burdens. If I'm right then the microservice model has one major advantage over the monolithic app model, which is that if things stop depending on a microservice you generally can tell because eg logs are empty or instance utilization is zero or whatever. With components in a monolithic app there are tools in most languages to find dead code but I've not seen them used regularly in many teams (especially startups) and they are often less helpful in that they can tell if code is no longer referred to at all but not if its just in a code path that is no longer executed. My gut feeling is that this leads to dead microservices being garbage collected more reliably than dead code.