If a service only say talks to instances of another service that is local, then every node in a cluster must contain ALL services. If the local service is overloaded but a remote service isn't then the service you are talking to will be slow, regardless of any front end load balancing.

Every service must be able to talk to every other service, because if it cannot then you cannot load balance or deploy without it being an n^2 problem. So the question is how to implement it WITHOUT complicating the services

Yes, every instance of every service needs to manage its communication paths to other services. That's N connections, rather than just 1 to the message bus. But this is a pretty well-understood problem. We have connection pools and circuit breakers and so on. And the risks are distributed, isolated, heterogeneous.