I'm not sure what you mean by a "network operating system", but monoliths are inherently just as scaleable as services.
Imagine you have a service architecture, and you are running 2 of service A, 4 of service B, and 8 of service C.
Alternatively, you could be running a monolith on 14 nodes. Most of the work those 14 nodes will be doing work that would have been covered by service C, it's just spread out in a different way.
Take a pancake. Put a hole in it. It's now a torus.
A straw is topologically the same as a donut. It absolutely has one hole.
There's nothing wrong with a monolith. Microservices are not inherently more scalable. Their advantage is around scaling teams. If anything, a monolith can be more performant as in-process calls are much faster thent network calls.
Those pressures being narcissism and idiocy?
There are no pressures forcing them to destroy these sites.
There are paths to profitability that don't include the drastic and hostile changes that they're making.
Seattle was not "literally falling a part".