I honestly expected people used passive-aggressive corpo-slang only for work / ironically. But this reads intentionally obfuscated.
But, to answer to the substance: you for some reason assumed that whoever designed first solution was an idiot and whoever designed the second was, at least clairvoyant.
The problem you describe isn't a result of inevitable design decisions. You just described a situation where someone screwed up doing something and didn't screw up doing something else. And that led you to believe that whatever that something else is, it's easier to design.
The reality of the situation is, unfortunately, the reverse. Upgrading microservices is much harder than replacing components in monolithic systems because it's easier to discover all users of the feature. There are, in general, fewer components in monolithic systems, so less things will need to change. Deployment of a monolithic system will be much more likely to discover problems created by incorrectly implemented upgrade.
In my experience of dealing with both worlds, microservices tend to create a maze-like system where nobody can be sure if any change will not adversely affect some other part of the system due to the distributed and highly fragmented nature of such systems. So, your ideas about upgrades are uncorroborated by practice. If you want to be able to update with more ease, you should choose a smaller, more cohesive system.