I understand that Xmonad probably is engineered like a large project, but I don't think it really qualifies as a large project. I'd say it is mid-size at best.
And the advice isn't that xmonad is large, but that it captures some nice patterns for scaling (e.g. the user extensions library is 10x the size of xmonad, but it all hangs together safely due to the interface class).
The "engineering in haskell" slides though, describe large projects, and lessons from them.