Hmm, context matter a lot. Im not sure on what you consider large development projects, so maybe its even bigger then what I'm thinking on. But getting the apis between apps up and ready early and getting a working setup from the database team to the frontend teams and apps teams trough some kind of backend/api team has always proven to be the correct choice for me. Also getting it as fast as possible on to a production server so its just the dns missing from beeing in production help so much for testing and highlights bug and other problems between teams. So the author mostly talks about this from a code perspective, but IMHO its even more important on larger teams.
(Sidenote: having this kind of architecture where you create layer of deps from one team to another is a bad idea from my point of view, but is still done a lot)