Microservices solve a specific problem: many teams deploying independently. A small system with a small team doesn't have that problem, it has the opposite one, and microservices make it worse.
Every service is a deploy, a monitor, a failure mode, a network hop. For a records system serving hundreds of users, that's operational overhead with no payoff. A well-structured monolith is simpler, faster, and easier to reason about.
The monolith gets a bad name from systems that grew without boundaries. The fix isn't distribution, it's modules with clear seams inside one deployable unit.
