Comment by esailija

> I guess a lot of it is because the APIs I’m calling are so badly designed.

Sort of, sounds like the problem is that you have a distributed monolith. If things are this tightly coupled they should just live in same process. If you even had just a regular monolith (which I don't recommend but it is much better than distributed monolith) you wouldn't have this particular problem. Of course another alternative is to redesign the system so that services are based on independent domain capabilities so that they have high cohesion and loose coupling.