Not every tool is right for every job. But the idea that services provide no guardrails is, in my experience, categorically false. Like I said, not a fan of "micro", but there is a ton of inherent value in defining implicit isolation barriers. It's absolutely true that there is NO design impervious to idiots. This has always been true and will remain true until the heat death of the universe. But man, "hard" isolation barriers are nice to have, either through services or packages. I worked for a company and I was on a team that built a set of packages which were distributed to a bunch of other teams, and due to organization changes another team took ownership of one of those packages. In almost no time flat it became absolutely convoluted. Not my problem though, right? Here's the thing: it became buggy and hard for them to maintain, but it had no effect except for when using that particular package. I had worked on a project previously where there was a legit monolith, no packages or library delineations, one code base, and boy with all the teams sticking their fingers in that particular pie things got out of hand in a BAD way. It was so bad that certain teams would get into change wars where one group would make a change in a module that would break another group who would change it back and break the first group, and back and forth.

After my team had taken that project and split it into a bunch of smaller packages, it's not like everyone magically became better programmers. The same people who were introducing fucking spaghetti code that did who-knows-what in overly complex ways were still around, and they were given effectively their own sandboxes. In fact quite a few more teams within the company began using those packages, which just became modules they shipped with. We no longer had to deal with people screwing with core packages because they no longer had ownership, they could no longer make merges into that area of the code base, so we could keep things stable.

So I'm a hard sell on monoliths. Like, I'm not actually pro micro-services, per se. I'm mostly just anti-monolith. Giant code bases with multiple teams simultaneously contributing are doomed to fucking disaster.

One last comment on this, if you have like 5 guys just hacking away on some project and you feel that splitting it up into 30 micro-services is the only way to make things work then you've got problems. I'm not talking about small teams building straightforward systems. I'm talking about giant organizations building giant complicated systems, trying to design and manage that.