I have designed a backend with exactly the same underlying philosophy as you ended up: load balancer? Oh, a problem. So better client-side hashing and get rid of a discovery service via a couple dns tricks already handled elsewhere robustly.

I took it to its maximum: every service is a piece that can break ---> fewer pieces, fewer potential breakages.

When I can (which is 95% of the time, I add certain other services inside the processed themselves inside the own server exes and make them activatable at startup (though I want all my infra not to drift so I use the same set of subservices in each).

But the idea is -- the fewer services, the fewer problems. I just think, even with the trade-offs, it is operationally much more manageable and robust in the end.