And what's stopping you from having a tightly controlled interface with a REST Api that is easily deployed, rolled back, unit tested, source controlled and deployed?
A rest api... how and why should it be responsible for your data? It solved a different problem.
You might not even need a database I guess, and then anything goes.
I need and like my database, and have suffered trying to get along with different ORMs. SQL is so good at what it is designed to do if you just let it.
(And why just one rest api? How about 100 restapis, some microservices, some web apps, some background workers, many different languages. One database. No ORM)
And you lose all of the benefits of microservices if there is still a tight coupling between unrelated (from a domain perspective) to tables.
One db can be a problem, or a strenght depending on the domain; And I really dislike religious design, esp microservices.
I have less problems by avoiding ORMs (and religios microservice arch, or fundamentalist interpretations of rest)
Database handles the shared state in a heterogenous environment. We need it to be centralized to keep track of money, the apps can't do that, two independent databases cant do that either. It must be one system that guarantees concistency.
It works great, there is no downtime. The interfaces are defined, the database stands alone, updates are deployed separately.
Why can't apps "keep track of money"? I'm assuming you're referring to transactions. Apps can create transactions and you can share transactions across apps using distributed transaction (I'm not saying distributed transaction is a good idea).