I was one of two developers who built a large micro-service system from scratch. It was the correct way to do it given the requirements and limitations. The dev-ops overhead was HUGE. Handling multiple repositories, versions, version-dependencies, documenting/coordinating changing APIs between the micro-services.

Even something as simple as having 12 different repositories meant 12 different Bitbucket pipeline yaml files and there was no way for repos to share pipelines. So one change meant 12 changes.

It was good experience, and HAD to be done in that type of architecture, but keeping it all organized was a challenge.