Kevin, thank you for a well-written, insightful, and very comprehensive article. There is no way a large microservices system can be configured and managed without service discovery. Top-down configuration just doesn't scale well [ c = n(n-1)/2) ].

Perhaps you might be interested in how our team has been doing it for a while. It's pretty similar to the picture you paint.

https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/designing-microservices-4130bc41c046#126e