>"Once there are more than a handful of people working on anything no one person understands the details of the whole. Smaller, specialized services can at least act as and enforce those boundaries as upstream comments said."
Until you have so many services, that you also need someone that understands the details of all the different services interacting.
Really, if you can't control your developers from leaking through separative concerns, then they'll do it in any architecture. Monolithic or microservices-based.
I think you can have separated services by concern without getting too deep in terms of complexity though... I wouldn't use the term "micro" though... I also think if you are only doing mutation, you can combine them, or do libraries in a control service... there are lots of ways to skin the issue...
Digging down through 7 dll projects in one solution, then 11 in another to add a small feature that should take 10 minutes taking 4 days isn't so much fun... same would go for 30+ service projects...
I'm also not big on starting with smaller/micro services either.. or ORM, or DI/IoC for that matter... Build the monolith and break pieces off as needed. I'm fine with that... I was saying it's easier to herd cats when they're not in the same space as eachother.
Until you have so many services, that you also need someone that understands the details of all the different services interacting.
Really, if you can't control your developers from leaking through separative concerns, then they'll do it in any architecture. Monolithic or microservices-based.