Mika, thanks for sharing your hard-earned insights. As you point out, too often we software engineers (and our managers) chase the software development "silver bullet", a mythical object that cannot possibly exist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet). That does not mean that we shouldn't seek better ways to do our jobs.

Microservices are over-hyped and under-defined, but they do have real potential as software engineering constructs. I believe that variations on the microservices pattern are the way forward, but it requires learning and experience. My team has been working on microservices using the Actor Model.

https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/software-architecture-for-the-cloud-c9226150c1f3