You're almost exactyl describing what went down at my previous employer.
The company already had a bunch of poorly written legacy systems which were used by about 50 clerks and written in PHP, Node.js and some .Net. They had problems with poor code and data quality, but none with performance.
So they recruited a new CTO and a new Head of DevOps which planned the new infrastructure together.
Of course now everything has to be split up in Microservices (or Nanoservices, because each one should basically have the least functionality possible) and thrown in the cloud.
The only thing where a separate service actually makes sense are the machine learning processes that should extract information out of received documents.
The rest could basically run in a basic PHP application on a Raspberry Pi without performance issues.
When I quit that circus, development had basically stopped altogether and they were already paying five figure numbers each months just for hosting.
I moved to a large corporation with the expectation that things should be better there.
Turns out, that basically the same is happening on a larger scale. There they have a team of four guys having to manage more than a dozen microservices which were cut in strange ways.
I am only a senior developer and no architect myself, but the ones I know are everywhere between crippling depressions and just laughing their asses of because of the stupidity that's going on in the tech world right now.
There are companies where it's done properly, but either I have extremely bad luck in my surroundings, or those are an absolute minority.
Our CTO actually thought he was doing a good job.