I think that a well structured monorepo might make a move away from all-encompassing full-stack frameworks and plugins to libraries, tools and special purpose frameworks easier to get close to a best of both worlds situation.
The background is deploying up to a dozen or less new sites and apps per year as a small team while continuously maintaining the old ones and wanting to merge in new improvements found in newer development.
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Rationale:
Big web frameworks and similar give you per-project productivity, structure and are batteries included, but come with downsides, such as less control, less flexibility, unneeded complexity and abstraction, legacy cruft and gotchas, generally poor performance that you "fix" with caching where you can etc. You end up patching over things with overrides, workarounds, and strip functionality that gets in the way, and in some cases you bypass the framework entirely. You are generally more dependent on framework specific solutions instead of general solutions and can often not do things from first principles without considering the hairball of integration issues that often comes with it.
On the other end of the spectrum you have the possibility stich something together with specialized tools, libraries etc. But you can easily get into the danger of inventing your own framework because you want that common structure. Also once you found some good ways to do something you want to enable straight forward reuse and maintainence. Refactorings, regression testing, performance improvements and possibly new features should benefit everything as easily as possible. All of this is _hard_ if your codebase is spread across many repos, primarily because you don't have a hollistic workspace that helps with these structural changes.
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My hope is that my learnings and experiments with monorepos lead to a way out, so we can make incremental, cross cutting changes with more confidence and faster feedback loops.
Does anything of the above sound familiar to you? Or do you think I might be looking at this the wrong way?