I would love to see a counter example in real life at an org with over a dozen teams. A well working monolith and a well working monorepo are like unicorns; I don't believe they exist and everyone is talking about and trying to sell their mutant goat as one.
What I said is that you should consider your experience prone to a bubble environment and as such it's very anecdotal. So is mine (a mix), granted. Which only means that neither extreme dominates out there. Likely a normal bell curve distribution.
What I did say (along with others) was that a little bit of technical discipline -- accentuating on "little" here -- nullifies the stated benefits of microservice architecture.
And it seems to me that the microservice architecture was chosen to overcome organizational problems, not technical ones.
> In every monolith, people violate separation of concerns and things are tightly coupled. I have only ever seen good engineering velocity happen when teams are decoupled from one another. I have only seen this happen in a (micro) service architecture.
I would write this off as indifferent or incompetent tech leadership. Even languages that people call obscure -- like Elixir that I mostly work with -- have excellent libraries and tools that can help you draw enforceable boundaries. Put that in CI or even in pre-commit hook. Job done.
Why was that never done?
Of course people will default to the easier route. It's on tech leadership to keep them to higher standards.