[sayrer]

This isn't really true anymore, in my experience. I've used Bazel with teams of 30-50 and no full-time maintainer, let alone a team.

Once the migration is done, all you need is a few people that do some Bazel gardening every few weeks, and it's certainly not a full time job. This can be someone that does operations (CI, deployments, etc) or a product/infrastructure engineer, or one of each. Github / Gitlab scale to all but the largest projects, and even then, you can just split into two or three "monorepos" and kick the can down the road. With things like BuildBuddy, it's even easier.

As the article states, there are a lot of little of hidden costs and paper cuts when using a many-repo layout. The one that I've seen that's most prevalent is that it obscures copy/paste behavior, since it's much more difficult to detect in a many-repo setup.

Going to Bazel or equivalent is a bit of a mind adjustment, and some languages are better supported than others, but it really starts to pay off in larger projects. Especially if there's more than a few languages in use.