A typical microkernel will have user programs that drive the hardware that expose a very similar interface to what a macrokernel would provide, from the application level there isn't a whole lot of visible difference but at the system level there is, essentially the macrokernel is broken up into a number of separate processes each of which is fashioned as a 'normal' user program. This significantly reduces the scope of the kernel itself which has a whole pile of interesting implications which usually manifest as massive reliability improvements over macro kernels, a penalty in raw io throughput and the ability to elegantly (on the fly) load and unload all kinds of OS components without the need to reboot the system.

But there usually is a clear distinction between such 'kernel processes' and user applications, they also tend to be run at a slightly higher priority to ensure that the system keeps moving.

Warning: big piece of opinion that may trigger some of you.

In practice (feel free to verify this yourself by downloading and building the latest L4 derivative), microkernels that actually work on modern hardware need a huge amount of baseline code to get IPC and memory server working in a distributed yet somewhat performant fashion.

There is a flag for compiling Linux without any hardware and filesystem drivers. That gives you the kernel core in a surprising small binary which is not that far from sel4 or okl4.

In summary, monolithic is the new microkernel :)