> What we are both suggesting, I have still always called the strangler pattern. It just has three actors instead of two.

That makes sense, in practice I've seen multiple situations where it was one "monolith" directly in front of another, and rather than a strangler, it was a tumor that ended up with things intertwined. Treating it like a service oriented architecture is a good way to think about it.

You still end up in situations where logic needs to be shared. Do you duplicate Auth? What happens when a new user signs up, do you sync users over? Do they read from the same database(s)? I'll also agree with the over hyped ness of microservices, but I think breaking out services and "rewriting" them to me is the way to achieve the overall goal. Even in the strangler pattern, you'll end up needing to share functionality, and either you have to monolith services calling into each other, or a service oriented architecture.