[jonpress]

I think this applies to almost everything except for software 'environments' (such as operating systems, virtual machines, etc...) and frameworks (to some extent).

Software environments and frameworks need to be generic because they have to support a very wide range of software behaviors on the layer above.

Another point; people tend to think that the terms 'monolithic' and 'modular' are mutually exclusive when describing software - But it's not the case.

Most operating systems are monolithic by nature, but many of these OSes are also modular in the sense that you can replace or customize various parts of them without breaking the system.

The Linux kernel does a lot of different things - It's monolithic by design. It worked out in this case - Otherwise we'd all be using MINIX. Monolithic isn't always a bad thing.