I think another very important piece of the puzzle is *when* to make the transition from a monolith service to a microservice stack. I have seen many startups getting distracted by committing to a microservices transition rather too early in their lifecycle, and on the flip side - big organisations postponing and accruing a huge transition tax.
Very astute observation, something which resonates strongly with my experience as well.
At some point we should transition from microservices nomenclature to just services to illustrate the true nature of these entities.
We are seeing more and more companies doing the transition earlier as the tooling gets more mature. But worrying about microservices before the product is not a good idea