My thoughts as well. It seems like the problem here wasn't "monolithic Django codebase". The author mentions that he had a lot of trouble getting new developers up to speed because of package requirements.

That should be the simplest problem ever to solve. Use a requirements.txt, use vagrant, and maybe even Salt or Chef if you require more specific tools.

Microservices are great in theory, but every app ends up requiring a lot more interconnectedness as you grow. I'm all for splitting services off, but it's usually something to consider once you're a few iterations in.