Stop building Microservices by default. (There, I said it.)

We’ve all seen the diagrams. Dozens of neat little boxes, Kafka streams everywhere, and the promise of "independent scaling." It looks beautiful on a whiteboard. But let’s be honest for a second: How many of our projects actually need that complexity on Day 1? At Dargslan, we’ve been discussing the "Microservice Overhead Tax." We see teams of 3-5 developers spending 40% of their time managing Kubernetes configs, service discovery, and distributed tracing instead of actually shipping features. Is the "Modular Monolith" becoming a lost art? Or are we just so addicted to the "Netflix-scale" hype that we’ve forgotten how to build simple, maintainable software? The Reality Check: The Promise: Independent deployments. The Reality: "Oh wait, I need to update Service A, B, and C simultaneously because the API contract changed." The Promise: Fault tolerance. The Reality: "One network hiccup and now we have a cascading failure because our retry logic was slightly off." I want to hear from you: A