In the real world, poorly designed microservices make the ball of mud problem much, much worse, and whatever pain you had in deployments in a monolith are now magnified ten-fold. I have not been fortunate enough to see well-designed microservices, so I suspect the ball of mud is the default. Can this be rectified through discipline? Probably, but I haven't seen it.
Asynchronous? Doesn't save you, when an upstream service changes event definitions and emits events with unexpected structure, and a downstream service starts failing. Can this be rectified through Async OpenAPI and rigorous contract testing? Probably, but I haven't seen this happen in a way that helps.
I have seen large companies survive perfectly well on a monolithic ball of mud, and small companies get lost in a mud pit of microservices.
My point is not that microservices are bad, they're not, they're just a tool, but they are a tool that is a poor fit for most companies, in my opinion. I can't speak to the few giant companies that need them and use them effectively; there is a good reason the tool exists.