I've had it work fine on large teams. The rule for me is that if contributors to the repo are as likely to change the submodule as the repo itself to resolve an

I've had it work fine on large teams. The rule for me is that if contributors to the repo are as likely to change the submodule as the repo itself to resolve any given issue. More succinctly, submodules are for internal dependencies we might change. The reason being that with some package managers and languages doing small incremental changes to a dependency as you try to resolve an issue is a lot of extra typing vs it just being in a submodule.