Except it isn't, because a microservice requires an isolated dataset, API abstraction, documentation, versioning, consumer contract, dependency chain, complex r

Except it isn't, because a microservice requires an isolated dataset, API abstraction, documentation, versioning, consumer contract, dependency chain, complex release management. It's a radically different design because it forces you to develop the entire system differently to deal with very different abstractions, ways of working, expectations. A distributed monolith is simpler, but simultaneously more buggy than a centralized monolith.