[everforward]

The choreography pattern has always felt like a top-down solution to what is fundamentally a bottom-up problem.

Notably the article calls out tracing, which is the bottom-up solution to this. Choreography functions by dictating a flowchart that events move through, so visible comes from that dictation. Tracing functions by watching what events move from which producers to which consumers, and surfacing that organic data.

I'm not sure I see the fundamental advantage of dictating these flows rather than observing and reporting on them with some kind of internally-standardized conventions on message metadata with some standardized tooling to consume that. They seem to end up in a fairly similar situation: producers can see their consumers and vice versa, both sides need to coordinate on changes.

I really don't think it's that much boilerplate, at least compared to the pain of dealing with a choreographer that's failing to scale or just generally bad (and which you now can't replace, because everything is hand-tailored to it).