I'm on the other side of this problem, with a company that went multi repo for bad reasons (political, not technical) and I would give you serious money if you could solve my problems by just forcing me to check out 50gb every now and then...

Instead I deal with a 30+ repo clusterfuck (technically we have 60+ services, but I only have to run half...) that is held together by hopes and prayers, takes literal hours of actual effort to bring everything up to date on master, and has become a fractured hellscape where people are afraid to leave their tightly constrained silos of service combinations.

Long story short... I will take a bad monorepo over bad multirepo any day of the week.

I suspect that your hours of effort to get everything up to date would exist in a monorevel, too. It would exist in a different form, and so it would be harder to measure, but a large part of the work has to be done either way. It's just that certain parts of the work become very visible.

Yeah, compared with the maintenance effort of running around to 100 different repos, keeping everything in sync and the deps all updated, I'd always take the pain of 50GB checkouts.