They aren't inherently more coupled than a monolith. But they aren't significantly less coupled either. The advantage to micro services is that you can develop

They aren't inherently more coupled than a monolith. But they aren't significantly less coupled either. The advantage to micro services is that you can develop, test and deploy/release them independent of other components in the system. But there are plenty of other kinds of dependencies that can exist between components and if you don't don't manage them somehow, your system will drift toward a "ball of mud" where everything is dependent on everything else and any change is cross-cutting and difficult. That's true whether you have micro services or not.