it's not actually irrespective of architecture. Some architectures are significantly more prone to certain kinds of problems than others. For example, monoliths can become so large as to make development, especially many-team development, inconvenient or impossible. In the specific case of microservices, the key benefit (multiple teams can develop and deliver in parallel without stepping on each other, separating concerns into their own ownership areas) has the tradeoff of distributed systems overhead, which can range from high latency (when a number of microservices are in a serialized hot path and the complexity is not being effectively managed) to lowered availability or consistency (when data is radiating through a network of microservices asynchronously and different services 'see' different data and make conflicting correct decisions). Monoliths see this set of performance problems much, much later in their lifecycle, because they have much better data locality and local function call characteristics.