Last month, a team removed their microservices. The latency dropped from 800ms to 12ms.

No typo there - it simply means your data doesn't have to travel across the network to talk to another service.

The bill nobody warned you about

Microservices architecture was portrayed as a solution to all problems; limitless scalability, separate deployments, and teams that don't interfere with each other.

What they actually provided was a bill charging for leaving the platform.