Microservices were a fad during a period where complexity and solving self-inflicted problems were rewarded more than building an actual sustainable business. It was purely a career- & resume-polishing move for everyone involved.

Putting this anywhere near "engineering" is an insult to even the shoddiest, OceanGate-levels of engineering.

I remember when microservices were introduced and they were solving real problems around 1) independent technological decisions with languages, data stores, and scaling, and 2) separating team development processes. They came out of Amazon, eBay, Google and a host of successful tech titans that were definitely doing "engineering." The Bezos mandate for APIs in 2002 was the beginning of that era.

It was when the "microservices considered harmful" articles started popping up that microservices had become a fad. Most of the HN early-startup energy will continue to do monoliths because of team communication reasons. And I predict that if any of those startups are successful, they will have need for separate services for engineering reasons. If anything, the historical faddishness of HN shows that hackers pick the new and novel because that's who they are, for better or worse.