I also think designing in the microservices mindset (i.e. loose coupling, separable, dependency free architecture) is something which can be done on a continuum

I also think designing in the microservices mindset (i.e. loose coupling, separable, dependency free architecture) is something which can be done on a continuum, and there's not a strict dichotomy between The Monolith and Microservices(tm). Even if you're working on an early prototype which fits into a handful of source files, it can be useful to organize your application in terms of parallel, independent pieces long before it becomes necessary to enforce that separation on an infrastructure/dev-ops level.