I agree with your notions of what the problems are, and what the goals ought to be. Though I think microservices didn't actually make it hard to put coupling b

I agree with your notions of what the problems are, and what the goals ought to be. Though I think microservices didn't actually make it hard to put coupling between parts of the system. It's the same old story of how everyone is doing Agile wrong. The cargo-cult implementations fail to deliver on the promises because they don't actually follow the principles. "Microservices" often means little more than "not the monolith". It's a pretty low bar. The loosely-coupled property is what is important. If that doesn't hold, then you've almost certainly made things worse. If it holds then you've almost certainly created a path towards making things better.