Don't disagree with the article, but to play Devil's Advocate, here are some examples of when IME the cost IS worth it:
1) there are old 3rd party dependency incompatibilities that you can spin off and let live separately instead of doing a painful refactor, rebuilding in house, or kludgy gluing
2) there are deploy limitations on mission critical high available systems that should not hold up other systems deployment that have different priorities/sensitive business hours time windows
3) system design decisions that cannot be abstracted away are at the mercy of some large clients of the company that are unable or unwilling to change their way of doing things - you can silo the pain.
And to be clear, it's not that these things are "cost free". It's just a cost that is worth paying to protect the simpler monolith from becoming crap encrusted, disrupted with risky deploys, or constrained by business partners with worse tech stacks.
1) there are old 3rd party dependency incompatibilities that you can spin off and let live separately instead of doing a painful refactor, rebuilding in house, or kludgy gluing
2) there are deploy limitations on mission critical high available systems that should not hold up other systems deployment that have different priorities/sensitive business hours time windows
3) system design decisions that cannot be abstracted away are at the mercy of some large clients of the company that are unable or unwilling to change their way of doing things - you can silo the pain.
And to be clear, it's not that these things are "cost free". It's just a cost that is worth paying to protect the simpler monolith from becoming crap encrusted, disrupted with risky deploys, or constrained by business partners with worse tech stacks.