[jyounker]

> This is all true BUT I think the monorepo as described here is the act of treating all your projects as directly referencing each other.

From what I read that is a correct assessment. What the OP is proposing is something of a strawman argument. No advocate of monorepos I've ever met believe that a monorepo should imply a monolith.

Generally they're advocating monorepos in order to develop microservices faster, and with less effort. Using a monorepo and the associated tooling side steps the pain that comes from complicated CI, the difficulty of sharing code, the difficulties of non-atomic cross-repo reviews, and the difficulties of making multi-app refactorings.