> Why do you feel this is relevant, let alone detrimental to the idea of microservices? It looks to me that it's one of the primary positive traits.
I did explain at the end of the sentence, why it was relevant: because rewriting in JS would have also meant switching to a completely new language. Which the team, as a whole had less experience with and which would have made it a complete rewrite without being able to reuse anything.
> This statement makes no sense at all.
I'm sorry you didn't understand it. If you asked a clarifying question I may have been able to explain.
> You stated the legacy codebase was crap,
No, I said one team member stated that the code base was crap. I didn't say it was crap. I didn't evaluate it, because I don't know (and don't like) PHP and because I didn't have to work with it anyway. The other two team members said the code was of acceptable quality for them to work on.
> and that a team member took up to himself to do the strangler's vine thing and gradually peel responsibilities out of the monolith. What leads you to believe this is stupid?
Because this is not what was going to happen and because they had been working on the thing for about 2 years back then without releasing it and because their planned release would have been in about 2 months. It's almost never about only the technology, these products and services serve a business purpose or provide value through other means. If it didn't matter, you can of course take all the time in the world, start over 10 times just to come up with what you think the best solution is for the problem. It's totally fine, this is the artistic approach. If you follow the engineering approach then you have to factor in the time and the investment too. Because in that case you have to deliver value.
Regarding peeling away gradually, this wasn't really what I said. The person pushing for the microservices solution said they needed to rewrite. So stop the world, rebuild the thing without having a working system during that period. (Because they didn't have a working system to start with.)
