Networking has little to do with it.

Microarchitecture needs to be broken up into components. Those components need to send messages to each other. Components sending messages to each other is arguably the core of what object oriented design was trying to do all along. If your devs were bad at classifying components in an object oriented design, then they'll probably be bad at it in a microarchitecture, too. Worse, the actual system is now likely spread amongst many different version control repositories, and teams stake out ownership of their repositories. Now you get more blockers spread amongst several teams.

Where the network layer comes into play is to replace something that used to be running in a single CPU core, or sometimes different cores on the same motherboard. Unless you can exploit parallelization for your use case, the kind where you have more threads than the number of CPU threads a single motherboard can handle (which can be several hundred on current systems), this will always be slower.