> If you could do local dev on that app as a monolith, it can most likely be done broken up in smaller services as well.

It's possible, but the overhead is a lot higher, and that weighs down everything you do. Your edit-test cycle gets longer, development gets slower.

> There are no silver bullets to be had anywhere, right? Just use whatever processes and tools that work, until they don’t I guess.

Nothing is perfect but often one choice is better than another. I've seen microservices go badly much more often than monoliths, and most successful microservice systems were built as a monolith first with services separated out only when it became necessary.

In think your interlocutor's point is that type checking by a compiler is a lot simpler, more reliable and more performant than any networked service discovery scheme so far conceived.

I think microservice architectures can genuinely decouple teams to iterate faster and consolidate efforts. But it's not a free lunch.