This is because coupling is a design instead of an implementation decision. "Make a synchronous RPC call between components" is still the "easy" and "obvious" way to get things done.

It's sometimes easier to spot high coupling when looking at code in a microservice world, but it still requires you to know what you're looking for and know how to avoid it, and not give in to the temptation.

Last time I was working with people trying to split up a monolith I pleaded with them to try to understand the coupling first, and figure out what a system would look like without that coupling before actually just moving all the code around and replacing direct method calls with ... other method calls that made synchronous RPC network calls.

No luck.

Error rate went up.