By sheer number of attempts somebody probably got good results with microservices somewhere.

Netflix runs quite well in practice. I think they do redundant service calls, what is the only minimally sane way to develop a distributed system. The funny thing is that I have never seen any serious discussion of redundant calls, except for it being implicit on practical designs on the anecdotal "how it works for us" articles that pop once in a while. Most times people won't even discuss redundant servers. I imagine everybody thinks it's obvious, and well, I would agree, except for the fact that most people I see do not think so.

But well, Netflix couldn't avoid having a distributed system, so they aren't really representative for nearly anybody.