>Microservice usually means distributed system. A distributed system is more complex than a non-distributed system since it has to do everything the non-distributed system has to do and, additionally, handle all the distributed problems. Microservices just hide the complexity in places where people don't see them if they take a cursory look over the code, e.g. what is a function call in a monolith can be a call to a completely different machine in a microservice architecture. Often they look the same on the outside, but behave very differently.

This is a false assumption. Some problems are distributed. Sometimes you'll have an external data store or you'll need to deal with distribution across instances of the monolith. You really run into pain when you build a distributed system in your single monolithic code base and your monolithic abstractions start falling apart.

In my experience you end up solving these problems eventually, monolith or not. You might as well embrace the idea that you're deploying multiple services and some form of cross service communication. You don't need to go crazy with it though.