They can serve multiple purpose and that's not the problem, because there's precedent in the literature -- software architecture the hard parts https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/software-architecture-t... -- for teams to organize architecture review cycles and decide if some microservers are better merged into a monolith. This however requires tons of refactor when microservices aren't design with this part of its lifecycle in mind, and we all know how this kind of investment is risky and hard to communicate to non-technical management.