I'm nearing greybeard status, so I have to chime in on the "get off my lawn" aspect.
There is no one general "good engineering". Everything is different. Labels suck because even if you called one thing "microservices", or even "monolith of microservices", I can show you 10 different ways that can end up. So "modular monolith" is just as useless a descriptor; it's too vague.
Outside of the HN echo chamber, good engineering practice has been happening for decades. Take open source for example. Many different projects exist with many different designs. The common thread is that if a project creates some valuable functionality, they tend to expose it both at the application layer and library layer. They know some external app will want to integrate with it, but also they know somebody might want to extend the core functionality.
I personally haven't seen that method used at corporations. If there are libraries, they're almost always completely independent from an application. And because of that, they then become shared across many applications. And then they suddenly discover the thing open source has been dealing with for decades: dependency.
If you aren't aware, there is an entire universe out there of people working solely on managing dependencies so that you, a developer or user, can "just" install software into your computer and have it magically work. It is fucking hard and complicated and necessary. If you've never done packaging for a distro or a language (and I mean 250+ hours of it), you won't understand how much work it is or how it will affect your own projects.
So yes, there are modular moniliths, and unmodular monoliths, and microservices, and libraries, and a whole lot of varied designs and use cases. Don't just learn about these by reading trendy blog posts on HN. Go find some open source code and examine it. Package some annoying ass complex software. Patch a bug and release an update. These are practical lessons you can take with you when you design for a corporation.
There is no one general "good engineering". Everything is different. Labels suck because even if you called one thing "microservices", or even "monolith of microservices", I can show you 10 different ways that can end up. So "modular monolith" is just as useless a descriptor; it's too vague.
Outside of the HN echo chamber, good engineering practice has been happening for decades. Take open source for example. Many different projects exist with many different designs. The common thread is that if a project creates some valuable functionality, they tend to expose it both at the application layer and library layer. They know some external app will want to integrate with it, but also they know somebody might want to extend the core functionality.
I personally haven't seen that method used at corporations. If there are libraries, they're almost always completely independent from an application. And because of that, they then become shared across many applications. And then they suddenly discover the thing open source has been dealing with for decades: dependency.
If you aren't aware, there is an entire universe out there of people working solely on managing dependencies so that you, a developer or user, can "just" install software into your computer and have it magically work. It is fucking hard and complicated and necessary. If you've never done packaging for a distro or a language (and I mean 250+ hours of it), you won't understand how much work it is or how it will affect your own projects.
So yes, there are modular moniliths, and unmodular monoliths, and microservices, and libraries, and a whole lot of varied designs and use cases. Don't just learn about these by reading trendy blog posts on HN. Go find some open source code and examine it. Package some annoying ass complex software. Patch a bug and release an update. These are practical lessons you can take with you when you design for a corporation.