The reality is, as always, "it depends".

If you're a smaller team that needs to do shit real fast, a monolith is probably your best bet.

Do you have hundreds of devs working on the same platform? Maybe intelligently breaking out your domains into distinct services makes sense so your team doesn't get bogged down.

And in the middle of the spectrum you have modular domain centric monoliths, monorepo multi-service stuff, etc.

It's a game of tradeoffs and what fits best for your situation depends on your needs and challenges. Often going with an imperfect shared technical vision is better than a disjointed but "state of the art" approach.

No. They're the "right now".

The future will be something else.

Have to keep changing it. No idea why, but it keeps us employed, so c'est la vie.

I have the unpopular user's opinion that I expect transparency in my connections and interactions. I won't use any commercial websites that have ambiguous connections on a whitelist firewall. I expect all businesses to operate like a brick and mortar store in real life. If I enter a grocery store, I'm not entering a bank, a bookstore, and a restaurant to purchase an apple, nor am I selling or giving up any part of my autonomy in my quest to satisfy my fundamental needs.

Personally, in my opinion alone, I view any business that is not transparent and straight forward about who and what I am dealing with as illegitimate and untrustworthy. I view it like inviting someone to a house party that then goes to the bathroom, opens the window, and lets other people enter my home. Or like a retail store that adds a bunch of hidden fees to their products because of something like various distributor logistics costs; stuff that belongs in the back office accounting of running a legitimate business. To me, the practice feels wrong because the default state of the internet being theft of individual autonomy with no freedom of information from determinism. I must assume that everyone is stalkerware, so I must be selective about who I enable in such a system. Micro services remove all accountability and make the problem of digital autonomy exponentially worse in the cases where they are exposed to the end user (data).