You’ve hit the crux of the issue. The discussion of monorepo vs polyrepo/microservices is always a red herring. Ultimately when you unwrap it, it’s always a too

You’ve hit the crux of the issue. The discussion of monorepo vs polyrepo/microservices is always a red herring. Ultimately when you unwrap it, it’s always a tooling issue. People will always have complaints and opinions about which is better, but the actual answer about which method is better is whichever method has the proper tooling built for it and that the company has bothered to take the time and effort to invest into. If the company doesn’t do that, both methods will suck. And ultimately that is, as you imply, an ongoing conversation because tooling needs grow and change for an organization over time.