> Microservices are a fairly recent innovation

Yeah, no. Micro-services are neither recent, nor innovative.

Fun fact: a friend of my consults for large pensions funds in The Netherlands. One of the projects he was brought in on earlier this year to get an outside perspective on was this gigantic monument to micro-services that had been built up over a two year period by ~200 developers, at a cost of around 50 million euros.

After two months, every developer was fired, the project cancelled, and the entire 50 million euro cost written off.

But it had great micro-services, hundreds and hundreds of them!