Somehow, it seems so backwards. We make our repositories more accessible for automated tools and less accessible for people and instead of investing coding time

Somehow, it seems so backwards. We make our repositories more accessible for automated tools and less accessible for people and instead of investing coding time into better tools, we invest it into local workarounds at every single developer's machine. This is probably not a general conclusion on monorepos, but the notion of "let's put auto-generated stuff into version control" sounds like the point in time where it all went awry. Yes, there is ClearCase where this is the way to do it, Perforce probably does this too and there are areas where you are supposed to be archiving your generated binaries with your code and scripts for later audits, but I'd argue most people shouldn't be doing this, since there are ways to separate source and release artifacts once and for all in a way to make both bots and people happy without locally-brewed scripts for checking out code.