I don’t think it’s circular at all. I’m saying that if the level of tech debt is held equal between both a microservice design and an analogous monolith design,

I don’t think it’s circular at all. I’m saying that if the level of tech debt is held equal between both a microservice design and an analogous monolith design, then the fact that the microservice design has greater properties of decoupling, isolation and modularity make it de facto better. Obviously if the baseline levels of tech debt or poor implementation are not equal, all bets are off.