it's surprising to be _so_ disagree.

The value of microservices is to isolate risks and have some manageable entity to reason about, to have an understandable scope of lifecycle, test coverage and relations with other services. The larger the piece, the harder it is to do.

Splitting up is normally harder than building up, and often impossible to agree on. Any monolyth I worked on was coupled more than necessary because of regular developer dynamics to use all code available in classpath. I've never even saw a successful monolyth split - you just usually rewrite from scratch, lift-n-shifting pieces here and there.