It's hard to produce a counter point because it's unclear what the OPs point actually is. What does monolithic mean? I can tell you that I am working at a start up (albeit one on the cusp of being just a 'company') on a monolithic application right now, it isn't even that many LOC, and it is absolutely terrible to work with. We are working hard to split it into the services because it is absolutely impossible to develop for. Now, that is for a number of reasons, but the point is 'monolithic' doesn't actually solve anything, it means you'll be trading one set of problems for another. IME, wrapping things into services isn't that bad and you can always break the abstraction if you really need to and fix it as you go, whereas monolithic apps it's harder to realize you've broken an abstraction, for some value of 'monolithic'.
