> Additionally, having five services accessing the same database is a code smell.

Counterpoint (assuming by database you mean database cluster, not a schema): having a separate physical DB for each service means that for most places, your reliability has now gone from N to N^M.

From which perspective? If a service is up, but is unable to do anything since another service is down, what good does it do other than increase some metrics on some dashboard. (Note that we are specifically talking about coupled services since the implication is writing to a single db being split up into multiple dbs - a distributed monolith).