You can have a monorepo without having all the modules share the dependencies. For example you can have multiple go.mod files in a single monorepo. People ofte

You can have a monorepo without having all the modules share the dependencies. For example you can have multiple go.mod files in a single monorepo. People often conflate these two things because often teams actually want to have centralized dependencies (so that you're forced to update or die as you said). If that doesn't work for you you can choose to have modules (or groups of modules) keep their independent set of dependencies, all while keeping the code in the monorepo.