I despise ORMs. I don't judge programmers very often, but invariably if there is an ORM, there is a fragile, tightly coupled, difficult-to-maintain project nearby
Perhaps you already have ideas on how to solve for this situation, but in case it helps: forcing active record model accesses to go via a layer of indirection can help with untangling this sort of thing: https://kellysutton.com/2019/10/29/taming-large-rails-codeba...
That said, for microservice extraction specifically, a bit of creative metaprogramming/monkey patching of AR to identify & categorize your callers is probably easier.
the data access abstraction layer is absolutely the "right" move. just hard to stomach the amount of work involved that's ultimately kind of throw-away.
the problem with activerecord is most people usually don't put this in place to begin with because the active record pattern makes it easy not to, which creates a massive pile of spaghetti code long term.
