What are the key benefits and tradeoffs of splitting a Node.js monolith into microservices?

Microservices allow independent deployment (a team can ship changes to one service without redeploying the entire application), independent scaling (scaling just the specific services under heavy load rather than the whole application), and technology flexibility (different services could theoretically use different languages or datastores) -- the tradeoffs include significantly increased operational complexity (network calls replace simple function calls, requiring handling partial failures, retries, and distributed tracing), data consistency challenges across service boundaries, and the overhead of maintaining many separate deployable units, tests, and CI pipelines instead of one.

// Monolith: a function call, fast and simple, fails atomically
const inventory = checkInventory(productId);

// Microservices: a network call, can fail independently and partially
try {
  const response = await fetch(`http://inventory-service/products/${productId}`);
  const inventory = await response.json();
} catch (err) {
  // must now explicitly handle network failures, timeouts, retries...
}