I disparage them, because most companies including my own don't need them. My team are keen, but I can only see it adding complexity. If your company genuinely operates at that scale go for it. But remember that Stack overflow runs on a pretty classical architecture.
Agreed. My company has a (relatively) mature MFE platform, and it rocks. The MFE team handles builds, deployment, and can build features like experimentation into the platform, so the teams can focus on the MFEs.
The MFEs are not arbitrarily small - they are related to specific experiences. A single MFE might be a collection of pages in a flow, for example.
It means less work for devs, more consistency across a big company, and much safer deployments - the worst thing that can happen if you ship a bug is to tank your MFE because they're all isolated. At a big company, being able to change something small on your MFE and push to prod without worrying about every other page in the site is awesome.