> this means you're effectively building a monolith with a microservice architecture. Is that really what you want?

I actually kinda do want that, although maybe it's a niche thing.

It would be nice to be able to deploy a monolith that's already cut at seams where there's an obvious API boundary. At one extreme, you could imagine a single binary where processes communicate via RPC.

What that would give you is an easy way to split off microservices as they're needed.

I'm sure somebody has done work along these lines.