It occurred to me a couple years ago when designing my deployment architecture that the majority of the complexity was just this. Instead of letting linkers/module systems do the work, I was doing all that stuff first by hand and then basically writing my own form of linking logic to solve a problem we created ourselves. Reminded me of when I read about the old ways people used to link code by hand...

And yes we were definitely cargo-culting...microservices were totally unnecessary for us. The only positive result is that it forced clean boundaries, but those could just as well have been forced by thoughtful architectural design anyway.