I think it depends on what kind of application you're building, as well as other factors like team size, experience, and time. Microservices aren't magic pixie

I think it depends on what kind of application you're building, as well as other factors like team size, experience, and time. Microservices aren't magic pixie dust you sprinkle over your applications to suddenly make them simpler and "web-scale". They have a cost in management and maintenance. You can end up taking microservices too far, just as you can end up making the monolith too monolithic. Having your core API all be part of a single application is great. It's my impression that for a lot of applications you can't really achieve good decoupling of resources, so trying to break it up into multiple services ends up bringing you a lot of pain. Maybe this is my lack of experience showing, I'd love to be proven wrong. I'm currently a fan of having a big/medium app that does everything that cannot be decoupled easily, and breaking everything else into services. This is a happy medium, because you don't have to worry about managing tons of services, but you also don't have to worry about having an absurdly complicated monolith.