(Disclaimer: at Google) It's not quite so black and white. It's true that repo-wide refactorings often get carved into little changes and so aren't made atomic

(Disclaimer: at Google) It's not quite so black and white. It's true that repo-wide refactorings often get carved into little changes and so aren't made atomically, but they're the exception rather than the rule. Any small change, e.g. changing an interface and the 5 callers of it, _can_ be made atomically. And changing code that's reused a small number of times is a far more common case then changing core libraries the whole company uses, so atomic submit ends up being hugely valuable.