[dasil003]

I am not making "wild assumptions", I'm putting a stake in the ground that a monolith is lower overhead than microservices, and thus better when you need to iterate quickly, which is always the case in early stage startups.

You're making fantastical, hand-wavy claims that belie the hard tradeoffs that need to be made to get a startup off the ground. Microservices absolutely add complexity and require more effort to set up correctly and orchestrate, pretending that experienced leadership makes that problem go away is dangerously idealistic. What experienced leadership gives you is good judgement on whether the overhead is worth it given all the factors at play.

The way you speak about the team, and different roles makes me thing you've maybe worked at "startups" that are actually established businesses with traction which like to retain the mythology and allure of being a startup (perhaps to justify lack of profitability). Things are very different in a true startup where the tiny handful of employees all must wear many different hats.