Adding to the theme of microservices overhead, I feel like the amount of almost-boilerplate code used to get and set the contents of serialized data in the service interfaces exceeds the code used to actually do useful work even in medium sized services, much less microservices.
It is possible that there are architectures other than ‘monolith’ and ‘microservices’. Component architectures are also a thing. If it doesn’t all deploy in one go, I don’t think it’s a monolith.