The actual protocol doesn’t matter, just that the team has to own it and publish it and other teams must use these APIs. Otherwise you get teams adding and modifying other teams code and you end up with the monolith anyways.

It’s been said before that microservices solve organizational problems. When you’re forced to go through official APIs, each team becomes responsible for their own connections to other teams. If you’re at a scale where a few people can be responsible for the entire system there’s really no benefit.

There’s not exactly a path per se as you should be able to pick up whichever is used at your job.

I’ve gone from LabVIEW into C# desktop applications into Android Java into Typescript web front ends all with some other languages and platforms sprinkled throughout.

The most important thing is being ready to learn and pick the right tool for the job.