> Our initial microservice architecture worked for a time, solving the immediate performance issues in our pipeline by isolating the destinations from each other. However, we weren’t set up to scale. We lacked the proper tooling for testing and deploying the microservices when bulk updates were needed. As a result, our developer productivity quickly declined.

Well, I'm not surprised. Microservices are made possible by advances in automated testing, CI, and deployment. You should have those things anyway, even if you have a monolith -- but to go to microservices without them is a pretty bad decision.