When can you actually use a distributed monolith design?

We always hear how great microservices are for scaling and letting teams deploy on their own, but honestly, a lot of teams end up with a system that's split into services but still acts like one big, tied together app. I've been noticing this a lot lately. Teams go for microservices, but then they share databases, or everything talks to everything else in a long chain, or the service boundaries are just too small. It's like they're dealing with a distributed monolith. Have you ever seen that happen? When is it fine to just live with that, and when does it really become a huge issue you need to fix? Are there good parts to it, or times when this 'distributed monolith' thing isnt so bad after all?