We were also built from the ground up with microservices and had the exact opposite experience. Faster shipping (more value to end users), more predictability (APIs designed/behaved similarly across functions despite polyglot tech), much less coordination overhead (deployed dozens of times per day with a < 10 dev team, pre-release backends well in advance of the user-facing parts), etc. We had to invest a lot in infrastructure, but that was worth it for many other reasons as well. Dozens of repos is annoying, but not for a technical reason (a lot of SaaS like Bugsnag and GitHub used to charge by project).
The biggest downside is it makes shipping an on-prem version nearly impossible. The infrastructure and the software are so inextricably linked that it is not portable in the least bit.