My previous had a monorepo for the website and backend (but not the mobile apps) which was insane to work with (as a coder I had a dedicated 128 core box to work on, some engineers had more than one, less intense engineers shared one) and a substantial amount of my time was spent just finding code. I guess most engineers just end up working in some nook and so that searching code constantly becomes less of an issue (it never did for me) but the code / debug cycle was dreadful.

I should add that a huge amount was invested in tooling. We had an in-house IDE with debug tools that could step through serverside code. We had a highly optimized code search tool. We had modified a major version control system so it could handle our codebase. (Indeed we picked our version control system because we needed to fork it and the other major version control system was less amenable to our PRs.)

My current job we have a micro service architecture and lots of small, focused repos. Each repo is self-documented. Anyone can checkout and build anything. We don’t need obscene dev servers. We have not hugely invested in tools or workflow.

Client apps are unavoidably larger repos than the services apps.

Based on my personal experience, I think monorepos are nuts.