[jeffshek]

In those organizations, I highly doubt microservices or monolithic decisions would have made a difference.

Disorganized management won't magically get fixed if the root problems of ASAP, priority, techinal debt, etc features aren't fixed.

The fact that the organization was trying to combine two large monolithic codebase into one is an obvious smell that technical decisions are made by someone non-technical.

[jameshart]

Well yes, acquisitions are frequently decided by nontechnical people. That’s where the money comes from.

For better or worse, nontechnical people sometimes make decisions. One of the jobs of a software architecture is to be robust in accommodating the consequences of them. Monolithic architectures frequently aren’t.