Architecture is a solution to an organisational problem. Microservices exist so that independent teams can deploy independently. With four engineers there are no independent teams — only one team paying fourteen times the operational overhead.
The tell was the shared database. Every service read tables owned by other services, which meant no service could actually be deployed independently. They had the cost of distribution with none of the benefit.
Microservices are an organisational tool. If you have one team, you have one service.
We merged down to three services along genuine ownership lines, keeping the boundaries the team actually argued about. Deploy time went from thirty-five minutes to four.
Distribution cost is real. Distribution benefit is conditional.
Nobody mourned the eleven services. What they mourned, briefly, was the diagram — it had looked so much like a real company.
