> It takes effort to keep a monolithic application set up
this way
Yeah, this is the problem and _why_ I think microservices are the way forward as it doesn't take effort because the programmer is forced into do the right thing. On project with many different types of coders (and lets face it we are all different) consistency drops off fast. Of course you can do it with monoliths but I'm coming from a "real world" scenario where there are many people with different levels of ability and different levels of giving a cr@p about code quality.
Micro services let people who code badly to do it in isolation and let themselves be the only ones who have to suffer under it, and ultimately learn from it (if they are not fired first).
Also decoupling in a monolith vs by deployment is really just which git repo the code lives in, which are next to each other in the same directory on your hard drive. If there is shared code factor it out as a library/module and install it into the projects that need it. Its not a big deal
My instinct from your response is that if we chatted on this for a bit in person we'd see eye to eye and we're probably thinking of different use cases, because I can see how thoughtful you are and usually it comes down to thinking about particular problems in particular companies. So at the risk of going back into crass generalizations, I do persist in thinking that the TCO of a monolith is lower under a lot of the constraints you're describing, assuming (big emphasis) the tooling of the language you're using for the monolith, i.e. a combination of linters and compiler, can enforce the rules. I've been in service-first environments where the equivalent of not caring about code quality in the monolith is firing up a new service without consideration for refactoring the older service, until I am in endless architecture meetings about how to make cross cutting changes around a bunch of services everyone regrets creating.
I suppose in the end it comes down to the classic issue of needing to pay down of tech debt, which is true in any software ecosystem.
