If you try to differentiate monolith acceptability based on "quality of architecture", you really have never understood why they are hated in the first place.
No architectual pattern can survive a lack of maintenance and grooming. Sprawling microservices written in a dozen different languages can be worse then a mangled monolith.
I always say if you can't design a monolith then don't bother with microservices. You shouldn't use microservices to cover up for a lack of design skills or a lack of communication between teams.
Every man is an island in the world of microservices.
Look, my microservice is clean and nice and has a 100% test coverage, I couldn't care less if you can't communicate with it from yours. Solve it somehow.
Now get off my lawn and let me rewrite the whole thing in scala.
