I worked for a company that did microservices well, and this was the norm, too. The term in my head is "golden path" or "sandbox". The languages were Go and Python, speaking protobufs over gRPC.

Developing software outside that sandbox was not disallowed, but you were "on your own" in terms of infra support if you chose to do so.

FWIW, the main "tricks" we found were (1) using a good build tool (2) use a good ci/cd tool (3) use a monorepo.

There were some minor downsides, and it took a long time for tooling capabilities to line up with our ambitions. But when I left, we had 200-300 engineers happily deploying to `main` across 100ish services every day.