I think it's not really microservices you pine for, but it's being able to untangle said ball of mud into discrete and - more importantly - manageable codebases.

100K LOC is hard to work with, but 10K is manageable.

I do think that's why developers idealize the microservices architecture; they don't want to have to keep 100K LOC in their head, or work with 10 other developers; they want to tend to their own 10K LOC garden, they want to isolate a problem space and focus on that, instead of the big picture which is too much for any one person to deal with.