Since the author praises proper use of databases and talks about event bus, background jobs and caching, I highly recommend to check out https://dbos.dev if you have Python or TypeScript backends. DBOS nicely solves common challenges in simple and complex systems and can eliminate the need for running separate services such as Kafka, Redis or Celery. The best: DBOS can be used as a dependency and doesn't require deploying a separate service.
Very recently discussed here a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44840693