What "not real" architecture is

"Architecture" gets used for two different things, and conflating them is how projects end up over-engineered and under-designed at the same time.

the decoration

Folder layouts. Which mapper library. Whether the service is called UserService or UsersManager. The number of layers between the controller and the database. These feel like architecture — they're the things you draw on a whiteboard — but they're reversible. You can change any of them in an afternoon. Spending design energy here is decoration: it looks like rigor and costs like rigor, but it buys you almost nothing.

the real thing

Real architecture is the set of decisions that are expensive to reverse. The trust boundary. The consistency model. What you chose to make synchronous. Where state lives and who's allowed to write it. The public contract other teams build against. Get these wrong and no amount of clean folders saves you — get them right and messy code stays survivable.

the test

Before calling a decision architectural, ask: if this is wrong, what does it cost to undo in a year? If the answer is "an afternoon," it's a preference — have an opinion, write it down, move on. If the answer is "a migration and a quarter," that's the real thing. Spend your design budget there, and let the rest be boring.