This is literally the example that I use, the most common case of over-engineering, having more microservices than team members. Microservices are the right solution for certain problems, but those were not problems they had.

Some anecdotal evidence. I worked in many of these places, and the most common tell of over-engineering is that when you ask "what problem were we solving when we decided to have all these many microservices?" the answers you will get is problems they either didn't have (for example, high availability) or they state a problem they actually had but could have been solved in the monolith.

In other words, they "overshoot" and - as I write in the post - end up with "a system that solves multiple problems partially, none of them completely, while introducing a bunch of problems you wouldn't have had otherwise."

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