Yup, at work I have a few projects split across several repos in like four languages. A completely new feature implemented across the whole stack involves PRs in up to 8 different repos. Potentially more.
To be totally honest, yes this is an unbelievable pain in the ass, but I much prefer the strict isolation. Having worked with (much, much) smaller monorepos, I find the temptation to put code anywhere it fits too much, and things quickly get sloppy. With isolated repos, my brain much more clearly understands the boundaries and separation of concerns.
Then again, this results in a lot of code duplication that is not trivial to resolve. Submodules help to a degree, but when the codebase is this diverse, you're gonna have to copy some code somewhere.
I view it sort of like the split between inheritance and composition. You can either inherit code from the entire monorepo, or build projects from component submodules plugged together. I much prefer the latter solution, but clearly the former works for some people.
To be totally honest, yes this is an unbelievable pain in the ass, but I much prefer the strict isolation. Having worked with (much, much) smaller monorepos, I find the temptation to put code anywhere it fits too much, and things quickly get sloppy. With isolated repos, my brain much more clearly understands the boundaries and separation of concerns.
Then again, this results in a lot of code duplication that is not trivial to resolve. Submodules help to a degree, but when the codebase is this diverse, you're gonna have to copy some code somewhere.
I view it sort of like the split between inheritance and composition. You can either inherit code from the entire monorepo, or build projects from component submodules plugged together. I much prefer the latter solution, but clearly the former works for some people.