In fact, I don’t think “scale” is ever part of the pitch of micro services. Independent scaling maybe if you have some particular hot spot. But the real pitch for micro services is and always has been about isolation. Isolating failure domains, teams and change management. That’s been the story since the Bezos letter and if the leadership didn’t understand that it’s a leadership skill issue. Not an architectural problem.

So this is a story about bad technical leadership, not a particular architecture. And if anything the initial pitch by the architect is the most technically valid leadership in the story (as poor as it is). They failed to understand the problem space but at least they identified what problem the architecture would solve. The rest of engineering leadership did the classic pointy haired boss thing of not listening and hearing what they wanted. They paid for it.

Or they're just bad at communicating and likely decision-making as well. I would say you're giving the author too much credit to be honest but I get your point. It's a poorly-written article in general imo.

Consider moving to micro-services only AFTER reasonable algorithms on commodity bare metal show real capacity limits. There's still higher spec bare metal to carry said designs through a refactor / expansion based on where the performance bottlenecks are. Even absent literal micro-services there's still partitioning / sharding which can spread out many of the pain points.