Software engineering is the perfect example of the "blind scientists and the elephant" problem. It is a very complex field, with a number of related but distinct disciplines and activities required to make it work; it's impossible to be an expert in everything, so we tend to specialise: we have back-end engineers, front-end engineers, data engineers, SRE experts, devops specialists, database experts, data scientists and so on. Additionally, the software we are building varies wildly in terms of complexity, dependencies, external requirements etc; and finally, the scale of that software and the teams building it can vary from one person to literally thousands.

Articles like this one, and even more comments on HN and similar sites, generally suffer from a perspective bias, with people overestimating the frequency of their own particular circumstances and declaring something outside of their needs as "niche" and generally misguided and "overhyped".

The reality is that various technologies and patterns -- microservices, monoliths, Kubernetes, Heroku, AWS, whatever -- are tools that enable us to solve certain problems in software development. And different teams have different problems and need different solutions, and each needs to carefully weigh their options and adopt the solutions that work the best for them. Yes, choosing the wrong solutions can be expensive and might take a long time to fix, but that can happen to everyone and actually shows how important it is to understand what is actually needed. And it's completely pointless to berate someone for their choices unless you have a very detailed insight into their particular needs.