[d0]

COM is different. The interfaces are well defined between components and processes.

In .Net, any contracts that break between layers in your dependency chain force a rebuild of all layers above it. This is not unusual in .Net projects as the components are bound at runtime.

There are not 200 DLLs - there are 200Mb of DLLs. Total count is 122 DLLs.

This particular beast handles integrations with over 100 systems using vastly different non COTS integration methods, has over 2500 tables, 950 domain objects, 400 controllers, 45 databases, 200 API endpoints, async background processing and piles of MSMQ queues. Data volume is terabytes. It's a behemoth and it's been around for 33 years in various forms.

If you, as we do, change architectural components and APIs, dependencies are broken. The main case for this is when we version our API. We have up to 3 API versions in production. When someone introduces a new API version, the oldest is deprecated and all the historic versions are ported to the newest internal API. This is where it becomes dependency hell.

However it's a fine way to avoid technical debt!