I come back to this tooling issue again and again. It really, really depends on the platform, too. Some platforms, like C++, require a lot of tooling work. So

I come back to this tooling issue again and again. It really, really depends on the platform, too. Some platforms, like C++, require a lot of tooling work. So it's kind of a natural thing to just add on to it. And in fact can speed up the build a bunch when you start tracking change of intermediate objects. For almost every web service kind of app I've been involved with, build tooling is typically very standard, and supports semantic version locking out of the box (e.g., bundler, Maven/Gradle, etc). Dealing with multiple repos is just easy to manage in a very controlled way. The places I've been at that use monorepos were C++ shops from long ago. Their tooling grew out of that approach.