Monoliths and Microservices are technical expressions of organizational structure. Talking about them in only a technical sense misses the forest for the trees, IMO.
People look at what really big successful companies are doing and draw inspiration from that. Problems come when they mix up cause and effect, and then view things through the wrong lens.
As you say, microservices are a mostly organisational, partly technical, effect of having to scale a huge techincal org. But then when taking this end state and viewing it purely through a technical lens (as, naturally, technical people are wont to do) it's rather easy to convince yourself that it's actually the cause of this huge technical org's success.
Of course he looks at Netflix and Google as best practices but that discussion probably spent more money in salary than our server costs.