> the situation where those APIs and team boundaries are exclusively (or at least primarily) composed of separate applications communicating over the network
It is always curious when someone writes that they are bowing out of a discussion, as if they don't realize that no longer replying conveys the exact same information. Was there an additional takeaway here that I missed?
Conway's law doesn't apply to microservice architecture.
Microservice architecture splits the functionality farther, than Conway's law talks about. When a single team owns 4-5 microservices - that's beyond Conway's law.
It is people who provide service. If the (micro)service produces 4-5 products as part of the service they provide, that's not beyond Conway's Law at all.