Ah, the classic "Scooby-Doo villain reveal" but with a software architecture twist. The company proudly announces their fancy microservice architecture, but when the developer pulls off the mask, surprise! It's just a distributed monolith underneath. For the uninitiated: a distributed monolith is when you split your application into separate services that look like microservices, but they're so tightly coupled they can't be deployed independently. So you get all the complexity of microservices with none of the benefits. It's like buying a sports car but filling the trunk with concrete.