[antonvs]

> If your devs aren't good enough to enforce modular design in a single application, what makes you think they're good enough to handle complex distributed systems?

That's a simplistic take on the reasons that monoliths tend towards breaking modularity.

What makes me think managing microservices is perfectly viable is that the last three companies I've been at have been able to do it successfully, with a typical mix of good and less good developers, including cheap offshore devs.

As for handling "complex distributed systems," in many cases all that's really needed is something like a managed container platform. Services like Fargate or Cloud Run, or managed Kubernetes, can do a good job of this. Developers can deploy and publish new services with minimal effort, and most of the operational complexity is managed by the platform.

You do ideally want someone paying attention to overall architecture to avoid obvious pitfalls, such as effectively doing distributed joins via REST calls, and so on. This isn't that hard to understand, though, and teams that don't do the necessary architecture upfront tend to figure it out once they run into those problems themselves.