As someone outside of google, I'm having a hard time seeing how this would actually work. Not as in, it can't be done, as in, is there actually empirical evide

As someone outside of google, I'm having a hard time seeing how this would actually work. Not as in, it can't be done, as in, is there actually empirical evidence that the supposed benefits (how do you know silos are lower than otherwise?) are happening as claimed because of the monolithic code? Do silos really come down, do big changes to underlying dependencies really get rolled out, or do people hunker down into their own projects, try to cut out as many dependencies as possible? Perhaps the extra tools, automation, testing, etc helps to a large extent, I can see that being reasonable, but I don't see how they solve all the problems I have in mind. Perhaps more so, if you've invested in all these automated tools, I am, perhaps (certainly?) ignorantly, not entirely certain what those tools inherently have to do with the choice of a monolithic code base? Couldn't many of them work on a distributed code base if they're automated? I mean, we're talking about "distributed" in the sense that its all still in the one org here...I realise that in practice, this distinction between monolithic and distributed is possibly getting a bit academic...