Yeah great point - there's a big tradeoff here, and I have lived through this problem many times at this point! But I think there's another way to think about this - in my experience E2E tests are flaky in microservices environments because of API changes. Those API changes happen in a silo because of the microservices architecture, which is a tool to address organizational problems, not technical problems. At this point, we are so far away from customer experience...we're breaking the product to make our development teams happier.

Personally, I think that devs will be happiest when they make a product that their customers love, even if they have a little bit bigger team than they wish they did. The alternative is an experience I bet you've seen - lots of small teams, too many managers, a low quality product, and the only people who are happy are the ones who don't look past the end of their nose. (To be clear - I don't have a solution for this tradeoff, I think we could probably screw it up either way if we went too extreme!)