[vergessenmir]

If your assumptions of a system fail on a single box they will fail more dramatically when they are distributed. If your system is designed such that it can't be executed on a single box then you're setting yourself up for a world of pain.

> Also running the whole system locally is usually a pretty good way of creating a "distributed monolith"

I'm not sure how you came to this conclusion. Nowhere does he mention monoliths or microservices. Even if that distinction is made it is good practice to be able to run your architecture on a single box as a goal.

Going through that exercise alone will force the designer to think about how the application scales up and down, having representative samples of data for test suites, coupling between services and so on.

The orders of complexity increase dramatically for each component running on a separate machine for the system under inspection.

Being charitable, the things you mention do have their place but they don't address many of the problems you'll face when building a complex system.