microservice communication, sync vs async. When should you pick one over the other? It really depends, right?

hey folks, i’ve been thinking a lot about how microservices should talk to each other. we often use synchronous REST calls for simple request/response patterns, but then we run into issues with coupling and cascading failures. asynchronous communication with message queues (like Kafka or RabbitMQ) seems to solve a lot of those problems, offering decoupling and better fault tolerance. however, it adds complexity, and makes debugging harder. so, what’s your general strategy? do you default to one over the other, or do you have specific criteria for deciding when to use synchronous calls versus asynchronous messaging? i’m curious to hear your practical experiences and decision-making processes