Sure you can do transactions across services. Do you really want to deal with the problem of distributed consensus though? If software especially built to deal

Sure you can do transactions across services. Do you really want to deal with the problem of distributed consensus though? If software especially built to deal with it often gets it wrong (as I think Jepsen tests have frequently demonstrated), what are the chances your team is going to succeed and not build a distributed monolith instead? I suppose in the end it depends on if you want to trade the hard problem of managing a monolith for possibly a much harder problem. I find that for these discussions, the definition of a microservice is too nebulous. Personally I think that if you have "state" that crosses service boundaries (ie. a fault in either service causes the loss of that aggregate state) you have instead built a distributed monolith.