You gotta realize we're discussing Google and you're talking about things which should hopefully be fairly obvious. And while reducing deps makes sense to any

You gotta realize we're discussing Google and you're talking about things which should hopefully be fairly obvious. And while reducing deps makes sense to any developer experienced enough to have been bitten hard by it, Google faces the problem that due to its size there will be lots of highly specialized code dealing with issues that would too trivial for nearly any other businesses to bother extracting out into dependencies. You should always make things as simply as they can be and no simpler. At Google's scale simple things will be necessarily highly complicated and specialized. You're also still talking about issues of concern to you which don't have any bearing at all on monorepo-vs-manyrepo. Fewer deps are clearly better in either model.