I wonder how many early stage businesses went tits up because they drank the microservice kool-aid and burned valuable engineering cycles that should have been spent on features on docker spaghetti.

I once interviewed at Fast. One of the questions they asked was how to scale up a rate limiter. In my mind I was wondering why you'd ever need to worry about scaling up a rate limiter. The answer apparently was some kind of microservice.

The company eventually folded[1]. Turns out the company was burning millions of dollars in hiring + infra, while generating only $600,000 in revenue.

[1] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-fast

Alternatively how many later stage business failed because all their features were in a Rails monolith that no number of engineers could maintain.

The Rails monolith companies probably have a better chance at adapting than the 50 microservices maintained by 10 devs companies.

This. Just silo the monolith out into tenants.

Salesforce, not exactly a small monolith company, did this for a very very long time.

Well, did it look good on the resume?

Someone had to stay behind and muck out the stables...

Yeah, but if that expectation was false, those people were justly punished. And if it was true, the problem is clearly elsewhere.