I don't view Conway's law as casting as negative a tinge as most seem to. It makes sense that responsibilities be split roughly along the same lines as they are

I don't view Conway's law as casting as negative a tinge as most seem to. It makes sense that responsibilities be split roughly along the same lines as they are in physical organizations, especially in orgs where software is not a hermetic black box but represents business processes. Groups probably have need to twiddle with the representations, and drawing the same lines of responsibility as permissions makes a lot of sense there. As a contrived and probably nonsensical example: if you have a widget factory, and you have two departments, sales and fulfillment, it's often better to represent a sales order as "An immutable list of items sold and prices, and a mutable list of references to fulfillments that satisfied that order" over "a list of items sold, prices, and how many have been delivered", with a separate object that is the fulfillment. Those are different departments, they move at different rates, and edit permissions for each should be limited to their respective orgs.