"In general, these pains are worth it" - with a system as outlined in the article, I disagree. As you described it, there are a lot of dependencies between the teams, which results in a lot of technical dependencies between the services. Which makes them a distributed monolith rather than microservices.
That said, you're on the right track with your proposed solution: As described, the system is a "people problem" and thus needs solutions centered around people. I'd suggest closely examining how the teams are cut. Rather than more meetings and alignment, I'd suggest finding ways to make the teams more independent (which may include a small re-org).
"In general, these pains are worth it" - with a system as outlined in the article, I disagree. As you described it, there are a lot of dependencies between the teams, which results in a lot of technical dependencies between the services. Which makes them a distributed monolith rather than microservices.
That said, you're on the right track with your proposed solution: As described, the system is a "people problem" and thus needs solutions centered around people. I'd suggest closely examining how the teams are cut. Rather than more meetings and alignment, I'd suggest finding ways to make the teams more independent (which may include a small re-org).