> Every time I've been monorepos compares with polyrepos it's always "monorepo plus millions of dollars of custom tool engineering" vs "stock polyrepo"
The costs of the infra/build/CI work are of course more visible when there is a dedicated team doing it. If there is no such central team, the cost is just invisibly split between all the teams. In my experience this is more costly overall, due to every team rolling their own thing and requiring them to be jack-of-all-trades in rolling their own infra/build/CI.
> And I don't see how discovery changes significantly from browsing through loads of repositories instead of loads of directories in a repository
If repository permissions aren't set centrally but every team gets to micromanage them, then they usually end up too restrictive and you don't get even read-only access.
The costs of the infra/build/CI work are of course more visible when there is a dedicated team doing it. If there is no such central team, the cost is just invisibly split between all the teams. In my experience this is more costly overall, due to every team rolling their own thing and requiring them to be jack-of-all-trades in rolling their own infra/build/CI.
> And I don't see how discovery changes significantly from browsing through loads of repositories instead of loads of directories in a repository
If repository permissions aren't set centrally but every team gets to micromanage them, then they usually end up too restrictive and you don't get even read-only access.