I certainly did not say these architectures appeared out of thin air. They were invented to solve the problems of internet-scale companies.
> Micro services solve tangible, real world problems.
Incorrect. Microservices solve tangible, real-world problems when they are applied to the correct problems. Microservices might also create tangible, real-world problems whether they are applied correctly or not. In fact, that's one of the points of the article, if you read between the lines.
> gRPC isn’t necessary hard to debug, and it brings a whole host of improvements over whatever ad-hoc mess you used before.
I don't know what you are referring to. If your microservices are well done, good for you. You still need to optimize the transport, which is a cost you pay only because of your choice of architecture. If you used thicker services or a monolith you would have different problems, but not that one.