I’m not sure what you mean by a “network operating system”, but monoliths are inherently just as scaleable as services.
Imagine you have a service architecture, and you are running 2 of service A, 4 of service B, and 8 of service C.
Alternatively, you could be running a monolith on 14 nodes. Most of the work those 14 nodes will be doing work that would have been covered by service C, it’s just spread out in a different way.
Seattle was not “literally falling a part”.