Microservices was at its core a good idea. I think Fowler was just overawed with how well it worked for him in his organizational context and was unaware of how critical that context was to making it work.

Most of my nightmares with microservices comes from where there has been > 1 per team. That came from people who read his "microservices are great!" blog post and just thought that they should build as many as possible. I used to hate him because of that - because it was a logical response to his blog post and people would use it to justify their technical decisions - with argument-from-authority.

In another company I worked at each team maintained ONE microservice and it worked really well.

Because it was a corporate environment with all the usual power politics, control freakery and lack of effective inter-team communication, even though it was more work overall and definitely a technically inferior solution, it did a neat end run around those systemic corporate issues by giving teams relative freedom of development, freedom of deployment and a deliberately simple, loosely coupled, standardized JSON interface to microservices run by other teams whom they didn't talk to much.

So, I get it, but I lost a lot of respect for him over his inability to parameterize his suggestions and the fact that he didn't seem to initially really understand why microservices worked so well for him.