So if Netflix has a "User logon" service, and a "payment processing" service, used across their clients clients you might be looking at a couple of "microservice"s with hundreds of related employees. Imagine services for Googles search autocomplete, ML, or analytics...

As the article states the "micro" aspect is mostly in terms of deployment responsibility, freeing those 10-1000 employees from thinking about the totality of Googles/Netflixes' operations before rolling out a patch :)

It’s 8 or so but it’s possible for me to handle it all. If we add features they’re going to be new services, so adding big features to the services I manage is unlikely. It is more likely that I get a new service on my plate in 6 months time than getting additional members of the engineering team to work on already completed services.

I’m obviously not entirely alone... I’ll ask for help if I need it, and I help out with other people’s stuff too, but I am primarily in charge of them and I am responsible for keeping everything working well.

If it takes 10 people to manage one service, it is not a microservice by definition. It is more like a 10x-microservice or a macroservice.

The definition isn't small teams, per se, it's a small area of responsibility with singular focus. A lego block instead of duplo. That lends itself very well to small teams, but you could reasonably have 100 people working on a service and call it "micro".

Reason being: if those 100 people weren't working on their scoped 'microservice' they would be part of a much, much, much larger pool working on the shared 'product', 'platform', or 'service' that contains that exact same functionality, only without the clarity/scalability of application boundaries surrounding the individual service components.

That's not to say microservices are ideal, just that the size of "micro" is highly relative to ongoing operations.