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> a lot of the benefits fall apart if you don't have people working to maintain the build environment, automated tests, developer environments.

This is absolutely true. Without a very strong culture around testing and deep, continuous investment in infrastructure and tools, a monolithic repo would quickly devolve to being a giant midden heap of code.

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How is that different on multi-repos ? The total amount of code is the same. You also need to keep build environments(not one but several), dependency management is much harder,etc.

I would say that any large project needs a "very strong culture around testing and deep, continuous investment in infrastructure and tools"

In my experience with small teams, maybe one person will take testing & automation seriously. If they've got a couple small codebases to worry about, it's possible for them to manage. One giant codebase would be too much work.

Obviously not the way it should be, etc, but reality bites.

So you've got a few small repos with good build infra,and many small repos that don't. Your overall system is still a sibling ship, and you have no economy of scale force multiplying your few people who take infra seriously

There are dedicated and volunteer teams that work on the internal tools and a strong testing and accountability culture. Everything is built from source.

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