[perrylaj]

I think I view the situation in a similar fashion as you. There's absolutely nothing preventing a well architected modular monolith from establishing domain/module-specific persistence that is accessible only through APIs and connectable only through the owning domain/module. To accomplish that requires a decent application designer/architect, and yes, it needs to be considered ahead of time, but it's 100% doable and scalable across teams if needed.

There are definitely reasons why a microservice architecture could make sense for an organization, but "we don't have good application engineers/architects" should not be one of them. Going to a distributed microservice model because your teams aren't good enough to manage a modular monolith sounds like a recipe for disaster.