Every time I see teams rush to microservices, they're still copy-pasting auth checks, reimplementing the same validation logic, and building separate database schemas that don't talk to each other. That's not distributed systems. That's just chaos with more latency.

I've been doing this wrong. Built a Go monolith at work, threw everything in cmd/ and internal/pkg/, figured I'd refactor "later". Now we're at 80k LOC and people want to split it up. Can't, because there's no actual boundaries. Everything imports everything.

What should a properly structured monolith look like before you even think about services? I'm thinking:

• Clear domain packages with actual isolation (not just separate files)
• interfaces at package boundaries so you can swap implementations
• Separate data access layers per domain
• no circular imports as a hard rule

Are people actually doing this, or is the move to services just masking bad architecture decisions? Feels like I'm missing something obvious.