Like I said, the value of microservices is that your design is enforced at run time, not just at policy-setting or code review time. There is a lot of value in that; coupling issues can't just "sneak" in.
But behold the coupled mess you get if your up front design (the boundaries between the microservices) wasn't perfectly chosen or isn't robust against spec changes.
Can easily happen for instance when architects that are too removed from the actual code are choosing the boundaries. Then developers have to work around it.
There will still be coupling issues. It just goes over the network, and is a lot harder to refactor.
I think this is something like a No True Scotsman fallacy. Somehow people see a tightly coupled mess distributed over the network "not real microservices". Ok, but the people who made it intended to make real microservices, and that is what is important.
