[The_Colonel]

The (monolith) product I currently work on has about 200 engineers working on it (backend + frontend + devops). I'd say it's of medium size, certainly not small. And yes, we can run it locally easily. The monolith starts up in like 20 seconds which I consider quite acceptable.

There are few narrowly defined responsibilities which are handled by dedicated services, and it is often more awkward to get them working locally. But because they are so specialized, you need them only rarely.

> And this idea that APIs are slow, unreliable and unable be to be strongly typed is nonsense.

Network APIs are inherently slower and more unreliable in comparison to an in-process method call. Some typing solutions are there, but they are way more awkward (and in some ways weaker) than statically typed monolith interfaces.