Individual microservices are definitely easier to maintain than a monolith. Ever experience a big ball of mud? Every monolith I've worked with, turned into one.

Sounds like you are arguing that for small teams a monolith is better. No one would argue that they are not. If you read my post, I talked about business that become a SUCCESS meaning that they grow beyond that initial small team. Once your team becomes large, if you started with a monolith, you will eventually need to either break it apart into microservices or try to manage the monolith across many teams.

IF microservices could be as easy to develop from day 1 as a monolith, why would you start with a monolith? Isn't that what technologies like Dapr are trying to do? Make developing microservices easier?