"I find it odd that there is this widespread meme—on HN, not in the industry—that microservices are never justified"

I think the problem is the word "micro". At my company I see a lot of projects that are run by three devs that and have 13 microservices. They are easy to develop but the maintenance overhead is enormous. And they never get shared between projects so you have 5 services that do basically the same.