Things like these are taken as dogma or a religion -- and are applied to all things in an organization, for better or for worse.
When there's a case for tighter coupling and less services, (and yes, there are cases for it), this memo gets brought up and microservices win the argument.
Each Service adds a marginal cost to maintenance, ops, infrastructure and debatably development speed (Easier to refactor in an IDE and semi-atomically deployed code than 50 independent services ).
If you have a team of 5 people, launching 50 services is probably not as efficient as 10 services.
As someone that tends to work this way, I can tell you that every API adds overhead. This is because they need to be documented, tested, and release-managed.
Each of my APIs is a self-contained project, with its own lifecycle.
That can, potentially, add a lot of overhead, and “concrete galosh”[0] to the project.
And I am not a fan of dogma, in general. I like flexibility, and dogma is anathema to flexibility.
> Downsizing with an intent to not grow in the same direction again?
More like we're not really big enough yet to justify multiple services, since everything still runs on a single beefy machine and we don't have enough experience running the system yet to really know where to put the service boundaries.
When there's a case for tighter coupling and less services, (and yes, there are cases for it), this memo gets brought up and microservices win the argument.