[Matthias247]

I can tell you that having a multi-branch code management system doesn't make this easier. You will only pay the tax at a different point in time.

In the monorepo you are forced to update things immediately if something brakes. In the multi-branch system things will get unnoticed for a while. Until you have to update dependency A (either due to a bug, security issue or you want a new feature), and then observe that everything around it moved too. Now a lot of investigations start how to update all those changed packages at once without one breaking the other. I experienced several occasions where those conflicts required more than 2 weeks of engineering time to get resolved - and I can also tell you that this isn't a very gratifying task. Try starting a new build which just updates dependency D and then notice 8 hours later than something very very downstream breaks, and you also need to update E, F, but not G.

I actually preferred it multiple times if changes would lead to breakages earlier, so that the work to fix those would be smaller too. So that's the contrarian few.

Overall software maintainence will always take a siginficant amount of time, and managers and teams need to account for that. And similar to oncall duties it also makes a lot of sense to distribute the maintainence chores across the team, so that not a single person has to end up doing the work.