[01100011]

Jesus, this. Look, you're going to run into issues either way, because you're trying to solve a difficult problem.

It's like thinking OOP or functional programming is going to solve all your issues... I mean, in some limited cases they could, but realistically you're just smooshing the difficulties around and hopefully moving them to somewhere where you are more able to deal with them.

FWIW, I've worked in a many-repo org and it sucked worse than huge companies with monorepos and good tooling, but I'm not going to make some blanket statement because it depends on the specifics of your code/release process/developer familiarity etc.

[brodo]

This. Every decision is a trade-off. There is no silver bullet. Context matters.