Microservice communication: Sync versus Async? Which one is better?

hey all, i'm wrestling with a decision for a new project and wanted to get your thoughts. we're building out a few microservices and are debating how they should talk to each other. synchronous communication, like direct REST calls, is simpler to reason about initially. but asynchronous patterns, using message queues like Kafka or RabbitMQ, seem more resilient and scalable in the long run. what are your go-to strategies here, and when do you find one clearly beats the other