[elteto]

But the number of targets is a function of _their_ code, not of using a monorepo, no?

If you need to build N libraries and M executables then you are going to have N+M targets (assuming building for one arch only) whether you use a monorepo or not... Either way you are going to issue N+M build commands.

Also, in bazel you can do

  bazel build //...

to do a full build of all targets in a workspace. If they are not doing this but instead passing each target name individually then that probably means that they are only building a subset of everything, and even that subset is too much to pass in a single command line invocation. I'll grant you that it seems excessive to have that many targets, but again I don't see having so many targets as an explicit issue of the monorepo.