Speed is fine, in the larger monorepo projects I have worked on implementing plugins using the worker architcture and paying attention to parallelism by splitti

Speed is fine, in the larger monorepo projects I have worked on implementing plugins using the worker architcture and paying attention to parallelism by splitting things into sub-projects appropriately always kept build time reasonable. You are correct that the biggest problem is that many people treat it as a distraction/unimportant part of their workflow and then wonder why things go badly. As the most senior member on most teams I am on I take it on myself to take charge of the builds, CI and other tooling to ensure this doesn't happen and all engineers are productive. Unfortunately that isn't a solution for everyone but IMO it's how it should be, you make yourself a 10x engineer by magnifying the performance of your other team members.