I'm sure the launch can be fully automated but it's kind of at the edge of not worth automating because of how relatively infrequently I need to restart everything... Also the CEO doesn't like to make time for work which doesn't yield visible features for end users.
I actually handed my resignation a month ago, without another job lined up. It became too much haha. Good practice though. Very stressful/annoying.
To me, that was the strangest idea - how could you "decouple" one service from another if it needs to know what to call, and what information to pass and in what format? Distributing the computing - for performance, or redundancy or security or organizational reasons - that I can understand - but "weak coupling" just never made sense to me.
The real reason for tight coupling is simply complex interfaces. That means a range of things; complex function signatures which rely on highly specific parameters (e.g. live instances instead of raw primitive values or raw data) or return complex values instead of raw information "here's what I did". It can also mean complex API parameters and response payloads. Ideally, complex processing should be hidden behind simple interfaces which don't encourage micromanaging the module/service. If the interface is as complex as the processing behind it, that's a design failure and will lead to tight coupling.
Separating code into modules and services may be intended as a way to encourage developers to think about separation of concerns so that they may end up designing simpler interfaces but it doesn't seem to help certain people. Some see it as an opportunity to add even more complexity.
Sometimes you need them all from source to debug across the stack, when you don't you might need a local container to avoid pollution from a test env, sometimes it is just fine to port-forward to a test env and save yourself the local resources.
Firing up the whole mess and debugging one or two of them locally is always a major pain, and god help you if you have no idea which services to stub and which to debug.