A loosely coupled component is designed to interact with other components with minimal dependencies or knowledge about them, often communicating through well-defined interfaces or messaging systems. Option 'Publishing messages to an SQS queue instead of making direct API calls to another service' is an example of loose coupling because it uses a message queue as an intermediary, which reduces the dependencies between the sender and the receiver. The other options describe situations that create direct dependencies, characterizing tight coupling, which is less desirable for scalability and resilience.