And even then, I no longer believe that "removes as much friction as possible compared to local functions" is a desirable goal in the first place.

Over the course of my short 20-year career, I've encountered far too many applications that accumulated terrible performance or reliability problems that were directly attributable to their authors feeling a bit too comfortable about getting chatty with the slow, unreliable remote procedure calls.

By contrast, the most successful microservices shop I ever worked at was very conscientious about doing nothing to hide the messiness of RPC. (Ease the implementation, yes, but not hide the messiness.) And that seemed to foster a culture of being much more thoughtful about interaction patterns and data flows and how they might contribute to or detract from the overall performance and stability of the system.