> If it wasn't for a good portion of tech leads FAANG aspirational goals I bet a lot more companies would be on monoliths.

I think you inadvertently pointed out one of the advantages of microservices: the ability to bootstrap ideas without having to be hindered by artificial barriers to entry. If you have an idea and want to show it off, you just implement it and make it available to the public. Call it "aspirational goals", but I don't see any advantage in barring people from providing value without having to wrangle bureaucracies, red tape, and office politics.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t use the cloud for deploying your software. But instead of deploying hundreds of small services, you may just deploy a handful bigger ones, and are still good. And you may also not need 30 different AWS services, you may be good with a database, maybe a message broker and a container runtime.

If you keep the infrastructure simple, it’s also much easier to switch cloud provider and to set up testing systems.