> They kind of forget (or didn't know) that it's not that long ago we did monorepos because we HAD to.
That was never ever the case. We did centralized repos because we had to, but every single place I worked at, whether they were using SCCS, RCS, CVS, SourceSafe or SVN, had multiple repositories for different projects. No place had more than 20 repos, but then, the largest of those was about 250 people with VCS access.
Most places I worked at had everything in one repo and folders for projects /shrugs. Though some did have multiple repos, though in my book, that's just "many monorepos". 20 repos for 250 people was quite manageable with old tools. When one system is split in 4000 repos, that's a different story.
That was never ever the case. We did centralized repos because we had to, but every single place I worked at, whether they were using SCCS, RCS, CVS, SourceSafe or SVN, had multiple repositories for different projects. No place had more than 20 repos, but then, the largest of those was about 250 people with VCS access.