[SiNiquity]

In my experience, the benefits of microservices are primarily better delineated responsibilities and narrower scope, and secondary benefits tend to fall out from these. There are downsides, but the "harmful" effects do not reflect my experience. I fully grant more things on a network invite lower availability / higher latency, but I contend that you already need to handle these issues. Microservices do not tend to grossly exacerbate the problem (in my experience anyway).

The other callout is clean APIs over a network can just be clean APIs internally. This is true in theory but hardly in practice from what I've seen. Microservices tend to create boundaries that are more strictly enforced. The code, data and resources are inaccessible except through what is exposed through public APIs. There is real friction to exposing additional data or models from one service and then consuming it in another service, even if both services are owned by the same team (and moreso if a different team is involved). At least in my experience, spaghetti was still primarily the domain of the internal code rather than the service APIs.

There's also a number of benefits as far as non-technical management of microservices. Knowledge transfer is easier since again, the scope is narrower and the service does less. This is a great benefit as people rotate in and out of the team, and also simplifies shifting the service to another team if it becomes clear the service better aligns with another team's responsibilities.