[tstrimple]

If a change requires cascading changes in almost every other service then yes, you're running a distributed monolith and have achieved zero separation of services. Doesn't matter if each "service" has a different stack if they are so tightly coupled that a change in one necessitates a change in all. This is literally the entire point of micro-services. To reduce the amount of communication and coordination needed among teams. When your team releases "micro-services" which break everything else, it's a failure and hint of a distributed monolith pretending to be micro-services.

[necovek]

As I said, they mention having a problem where each service depended on different versions of internal shared libraries. That indicates they did not need to update all at once:

  > When pressed for time, engineers would only include the updated versions of these libraries on a single destination’s codebase.
  > Over time, the versions of these shared libraries began to diverge across the different destination codebases.
  > ...
  > Eventually, all of them were using different versions of these shared libraries.