Twelve services. Every deploy still goes out together. One of them fails and the whole feature dies.
That's a distributed monolith — the same tangle as before, now with network calls between the knots.
The tell isn't the diagram. It's the questions:
→ Can this service deploy alone?
→ Can it survive its neighbour being down?
→ Does it own its data, or share a table?
Three no's and you didn't split anything. You added latency, retries and partial failure to code that was working fine.
Services aren't drawn around nouns. They're drawn around teams that change independently.