The idea sounds related to the distinction between essential and accidental complexity.

https://ferd.ca/complexity-has-to-live-somewhere.html

I really like the article above in that complexity does have to live somewhere. If you have a hard problem to solve, there is a minimum level of complexity (essential complexity) that can't be further reduced, only moved from one place to another.

And yet we often add accidental complexity by making bad choices (thinking of you, microservices). If your choice is bad enough, you get all the disadvantages (challenges with distributed systems, complicated debugging), but without any of its advantages (a distributed monolith doesn't get you any deployment or team independence).

Telling one from the other, well, is something I'd like to learn and that seems to require both experience and some sort of intuition.