I've spent 8 years as a product manager watching engineering teams burn out trying to adopt the latest microservices craze, yet our most stable releases came from a simple monolith. The complexity tax of distributed systems—network latency, debugging hell, DevOps overhead—often outweighs the scalability benefits for small to mid-sized teams. Is chasing the newest software architecture trend really worth it when 80% of startups never reach the scale that demands it? I'm leaning toward no, but I've seen a few cases where the modularity saved the project, so I'm genuinely torn.