On my reading, this is the exact same problem, not the exact opposite problem. The break-even bar for a reasonable monolith is a lot lower than for microservices, so the GP's question is specifically asking, under a hypothetical where the team simply uses a monolith, what benefits the team would miss out on relative to microservices. If there are none, or they aren't relevant to the project scenario, then microservices probably isn't justifiable.

(I, too, am in the position of pushing back against microservices for hotness' sake.)

The point is it can be engineers pushing back against managers. Not just managers pushing back against engineers.

Aha! Opposite in that direction; I misread. (I'm also an engineer pushing back on managers who want microservices.)

This. I'm a consultant and 90% of the time the technology has already been decided by our fancy management team who haven't written code in 10+ years before a line of code has been written. But they know the buzzwords like the rest of us and know they sell.

Problem is they no longer have to implement, so they are even more inclined to sell the most complicated tech stack that have marketing pages claiming they scale to basically infinity.

In my company we store financial data for hundreds of thousands of clients in sql db. It's decade okd system and we have hundreds of tables, stored procedures (some touching dozen+ tables) and rely on transactions.

It took me weeks to convince my managers not to migrate to new hot nosql solution because "it's in cloud, it's scalable and it also supports sql queries".