It's the Kafka cool-aid being regurgitated. Kafka is the pipe that you need. Micro-services provide APIs to state that they manage that they get from Kafka. That all scales out and services have nice independent failure modes (as long as Kafka doesn't fail). What it doesn't consider, however, is if you have to perform atomic operations across micro-services (you can't easily do this with existing technology). And, yes, you would like exactly-once processing of events, which is non-trivial - even with the new exactly-once message reception feature in Kafka.

If your services are completely separable, this approach is great. Otherwise, monolith it.