In two decades of development I've never once seen a monolithic architecture that with some form of shared database not be terrible for the business it powered. I certainly understand why it's very common, it's what's still being taught to most CS students in my country after all, and, it's frankly a lot easier to implement. The result, however, is always the same. It ends up being a mess where nobody can do anything because the data structures are so intertwined (and undocumented) that nobody knows how it's actually used. What happens is that monoliths become magnets for business logic, and then you bottleneck every change into requireing a select few members of your organisation. As time goes by, you end up with a giant turd that stagnates and directly hurts your business. Not by intention, but because that's exactly what happens when you make things complicated.
It's important to keep in mind that this isn't a technical problem. It's an organisational problem. In fact, there is no technical reason why monoliths would be an anti-pattern, which is likely why they are still being taught as though they weren't at many universities where professors still naively think that the MBA's aren't going to cost-cut IT at every opportunity even though their entire organisation is made up of employees who spend 100% of their working time on IT devices of some form. Similarily, Microservices, aren't really the "technical" response to this. It's how IT and digitalisation had to evolve to keep up with business demands and better generate value. The simpler and more decoupled you keep things, the better you'll be able to respond to business needs. Sure, there are a gazillion different ways to do Microservices wrong, and if you do it wrong, then you'll likely be in the same mess that you would be with a monolith, only so much worse, because now you have 9 million tiny monoliths and shared databases.
Luckily we still live in a world where everyone is somehow still OK with IT not working. We went to an appointment that isn't relevant the other day, and they had a tablet where you could register your license plate to avoid getting a parking ticket. It didn't work, so we talked with the receptionist who was like "yeah, it does that all the time, don't worry, if the systems are down then they can't give out tickets"... Fine for us, but think about that... It turned out the system was down in my entire city, which means that all those hundreds of employees who are out handing out tickets had nothing to do while their IT system was being fixed, hell, the entire company wasn't generating income for my city while their IT was down, and this was a regular occurrence? What my point with this is, is that you can do things really wrong, and still be a "successful" company, it's just that the companies who manage to generate value better (which is frankly always microservices of some form) tend to simply do better. But like I said. You can do "microservices" in a million different ways. Running two different django backends to handle different parts of Instagram could be considered having two microservices after all. The importance is how you deal with the needs of your organisaiton in a rapid fashion.
Agree with most everything you've said. Just want to point out that IT stuff not working properly is only grudgingly accepted when users are captive. Could be a government service (as in your example), corporate monopoly, or a work mandated application. If it doesn't work properly, users are stuck with it no matter what.
But for anything where there's healthy competition, this completely changes. Errors, bugs, conceptual problems, etc absolutely will have an extremely negative impact.
As an example I once worked for a company selling tickets online, but there were numerous bugs, and the system would often crash under load. Long story short, we lost many users to competitors, that company is no longer independent, and all that code is now legacy.
Compare with the monopoly situation of Ticketmaster, they are far worse than this company ever was, and are quite successful, with a large user base. That hates them ;-)
The problem with most companies and monoliths is they broke the first rule of engineering, keep it simple. A tool or service should have one purpose in mind. Mutli-tools are fine if they are used infrequently, but not one tool should share the same burden or it loses efficiency.
Same thing happens in microservices too. You just need good planning an organizing.
It's important to keep in mind that this isn't a technical problem. It's an organisational problem. In fact, there is no technical reason why monoliths would be an anti-pattern, which is likely why they are still being taught as though they weren't at many universities where professors still naively think that the MBA's aren't going to cost-cut IT at every opportunity even though their entire organisation is made up of employees who spend 100% of their working time on IT devices of some form. Similarily, Microservices, aren't really the "technical" response to this. It's how IT and digitalisation had to evolve to keep up with business demands and better generate value. The simpler and more decoupled you keep things, the better you'll be able to respond to business needs. Sure, there are a gazillion different ways to do Microservices wrong, and if you do it wrong, then you'll likely be in the same mess that you would be with a monolith, only so much worse, because now you have 9 million tiny monoliths and shared databases.
Luckily we still live in a world where everyone is somehow still OK with IT not working. We went to an appointment that isn't relevant the other day, and they had a tablet where you could register your license plate to avoid getting a parking ticket. It didn't work, so we talked with the receptionist who was like "yeah, it does that all the time, don't worry, if the systems are down then they can't give out tickets"... Fine for us, but think about that... It turned out the system was down in my entire city, which means that all those hundreds of employees who are out handing out tickets had nothing to do while their IT system was being fixed, hell, the entire company wasn't generating income for my city while their IT was down, and this was a regular occurrence? What my point with this is, is that you can do things really wrong, and still be a "successful" company, it's just that the companies who manage to generate value better (which is frankly always microservices of some form) tend to simply do better. But like I said. You can do "microservices" in a million different ways. Running two different django backends to handle different parts of Instagram could be considered having two microservices after all. The importance is how you deal with the needs of your organisaiton in a rapid fashion.