It probably wasn't a joke. If you call something HelperUtil, it will become a dumping ground. That's a learnable lesson around naming, a mistake, but it's not learnable if it keeps getting described as a joke.

C# accidentally solved this problem with extension methods, these little helper utils at least get grouped by type and not in one humongous file. Or maybe that was part of the design team's intention behind them all along.

And because they're static you can easily see when services or state are getting passed into a method, clearly showing when it should in fact be some sort of service or a new type.

In the microservices world this is the monolith itself sitting in the center :/

Even in architectures that start as distributed, I’ve seen the “involuntary monolith” arising.

Way too common, unfortunately.

Of course, it just becomes the HelperUtilService!