I first ventured into distributed state analysis when we did SOA via messaging (JMS) and have been treading water ever since, so what you're saying is not alien to me. When microservices became fashionable, I was astounded that people would adopt such a construct, when even with SOA we had real troubles reconciling things without XA, which we abandoned a few years after we started using it.

I had the same experience with application-servers and Spring and XML and YAML since, but this was the push that set me off to make this my life's work.