This was seriously proposed by some. E.g. "scaling services independently"

Scaling services independently is usually a recipe for outages where something is at the wrong scale. Sometimes you want to separate workloads that don't fit the request response model well because they take too long or use too much CPU or RAM, but you don't need micro services to get that benefit.

I don't think anyone was claiming it would lower latency for typical requests except maybe indirectly through materializing views in event-driven architecture.

I think the steel man has been about scaling teams, but the discourse was not limited to that.