When people say stuff like this, I genuinely wonder if they actually
used lerna. Lerna is more or less a wrapper around yarn/npm, and still 100% totally sucks. Nor does it solve ANY of the problems GP mentions -- which I've also had -- recognizing code from other modules, live-reloading schemas, don't even get me started on jerry-rigging like 8 different webpack plugins because you need sass, but you also need an SVG loader, and also a JSX loader but oops now you're running into some weird conflict between them, etc. etc.
It's honestly embarrassing that modern web development (an incredibly "dumb" network protocol at its core) doesn't have an easier onboarding/development process.