Hey Dave,
No problem. There was a ton of good stuff in there! I saved it to refer back to it later. :)
As a tech coach, I teach good programming skills, which mostly ends up being TDD and other good coding skills for OOP folks. But I've become a huge pure FP fan over the past decade, learning it all on my own just by struggling through it.
So as a coach, I'm seeing more and more of these microservice train wrecks. I'm also seeing a ton of people who don't understand microservices come online and bitch about how they don't work.
Wlaschin's book goes into building a pure FP system from the top-down -- something I never considered doing (I've never coached or worked in a large pure FP shop). Of course, if you build it out that way, it really doesn't matter how you splice up the code or where it goes. You can do monolith, serverless, microservices, whatever.
I liked the process described in the book a lot. It describes to me how you can have 50 people and 100 microservices and make it all work. (Although everything you point out is still an issue, many of the pure FP techniques mitigate them.) Feels a lot like BDUF, though, which kinda bugs me.
I sat down with Uncle Bob last month and spend a week showing him F#. TDD didn't seem to work that well, but maybe I missed it. There's just nothing to test in simple transforms, and you want to keep using simple transforms as much as you can. I think we need to evolve a TDD-like process for growing systems in pure FP from the ground-up. I'll probably cogitate on this for a few years and end up writing something. If you know of any good resources, please send them my way!