I don't disagree at all. As with most things in life, throwing money at the problem will solve this. In a lot of positions I've been in, this cost becomes "the cost of doing business" that everyone assumes rather than, "we can do better, but for now this is our reality."
> Monolithic applications don't encourage naive approaches;
Perhaps, naive is a poor choice of words. Maybe, an example is better:
You develop a large system that's going to support an entire state's childrens meal plans. You can easily do this in a monolithic architecture, but is it worth investing time to save on peeling apart the obvious points of high use now?
Children / parents only have to sign up once, but they need access to their meal plans everyday. I see two services here in this simple example, and if I'm strapped for time -- I defer a user management service to some sort of SAAS / PAAS so I don't have to deal with that overhead.
I see a great deal of value to everyone in investing in the optimizations that have high return, but minding Knuth's rhetoric that "premature optimization is the root of all evil."