Beyond a certain scale, atomic commits don't work in monolithic repos either. If a big commit touches code in many areas, it needs to be broken up into many sma

Beyond a certain scale, atomic commits don't work in monolithic repos either. If a big commit touches code in many areas, it needs to be broken up into many small commits, so that experts in each of those areas can review, rework, and approve those changes without tripping over each other. Those small commits won't all happen at the same time, so they need to be backward compatible. Now depending on the tooling, you're back to essentially the same workflow you'd have with many repos. Granted, this is based on experience at several startups and a single huge company with a famous monorepo. Maybe there is a size in the middle where a single dev can still understand all the code well enough to make a sweeping commit without breaking lots of things.